THE PATH TO ROME 



THE 

PATH TO ROME 



BY 



H. pLLOC 

AUTHOR OF " CANTON," " ROBESPIERRE, " "PARIS," ETC. 



" . . amore 
Antiqui ritus, alto sub numine Roma'"' 



G. P. PUTNAM'S SONS 
NEW YORK AND LONDON 
Cbe Ikntckcrbocfccr pcess 









Copyright, IQ02, by 
H. Belloc 



All riphti reserved 







Made in the United States of America 



t+J 



TO 

MISS R. H. BUSK 




PRAISE OF THIS BOOK 

To every honest reader that may purchase, hire, or 
receive this book, and to the reviewers also (to whom 
it is of triple profit), greeting — and whatever else 
can be had for nothing. 

If you should ask how this book came to be 
written, it was in this way. One day as I was 
wandering over the world I came upon the valley 
where I was born, and stopping there a moment to 
speak with them all — when I had argued politics 
with the grocer, and played the great lord with the 
notary-public, and had all but made the carpenter 
a Christian by force of rhetoric — what should I note 
(after so many years) but the old tumble-down and 
gaping church, that I love more than mother-church 
herself, all scraped, white, rebuilt, noble and new, 
as though it had been finished yesterday. Knowing 
very well that such a change had not come from the 



viii PRAISE OF THIS BOOK 

skinflint populace, but was the work of some just 
artist who knew how grand an ornament was this 
shrine (built there before our people stormed 
Jerusalem), I entered, and there saw that all 
within was as new, accurate, and excellent as the 
outer part ; and this pleased me as much as though 
a fortune had been left to us all ; for one's native 
place is the shell of one's soul, and one's church is 
the kernel of that nut. 

Moreover, saving my prayers there, I noticed 
behind the high altar a statue of Our Lady, so 
extraordinary and so different from all I had ever 
seen before, so much the spirit of my valley, that 
I was quite taken out of myself and vowed a vow 
there to go to Rome on Pilgrimage and see all 
Europe which the Christian Faith has saved ; and I 
said, " I will start from the place where I served in 
arms for mv sins ; I will walk all the way and take 
advantage of no wheeled thing ; I will sleep rough 
and cover thirty miles a day, and I will hear Mass 
every morning ; and I will be present at High Mass 
in St. Peter's on the Feast of St. Peter and St. 
Paul." 

Then I went out of the church still having that 
Statue in my mind, and I walked again farther into 
the world, away from my native valley, and so ended 



PRAISE OF THIS BOOK ix 

some months after in a place whence I could fulfil 
my vow ; and I started as you shall hear. All my 
other vows I broke one by one. For a faggot must 
be broken every stick singly. But the strict vow I 
kept, for I entered Rome on foot that year in time, 
and I heard High Mass on the Feast of the Apostles, 
as many can testify — to wit : Monsignor this, and 
Chamberlain the other, and the Bishop of so-and- 
so — o — polls In partibus infidelium ; for we were all 
there together. 

And why (you will say) is all this put by itself in 
what Anglo-Saxons call a Foreword, but gentlemen 
a Preface? Why, it is because I have noticed that 
no book can appear without some such thing tied 
on before it ; and as it is folly to neglect the fashion, 
be certain that I read some eight or nine thousand 
of them to be sure of how they were written and to 
be safe from generalising on too frail a basis. 

And having read them and discovered first, that 
it was the custom of my contemporaries to belaud 
themselves in this prolegomenaical ritual (some 
saying in few words that they supplied a want, others 
boasting in a hundred that they were too grand to 
do any such thing, but most of them baritoning 
their apologies and chanting their excuses till one 
knew that their pride was toppling over) — since, I 



x PRAISE OK THIS BOOK 

sav, it seemed a necessity to extol one's work, I wrote 
simply on the lintel of my diary, " Praise of this Book" 
so as to end the matter at a blow. But whether 
there will be praise or blame I really cannot tell, 
for I am riding my pen on the snaffle, and it has a 
mouth ot iron. 

Now there is another thing book writers do in 
their Prefaces, which is to introduce a mass of 
nincompoops of whom no one ever heard, and to say 
" my thanks are due to such and such " all in a 
litany, as though any one cared a farthing for the 
rats ! If I omit this believe me it is but on account 
of the multitude and splendour of those who have 
attended at the production of this volume. For the 
stories in it are copied straight trom the best authors 
of the Renaissance, the music was written bv the 
masters of the eighteenth century, the Latin is 
Erasmus' own ; indeed, there is scarcely a word that 
is mine. I must also mention the Nine Muses, the 
Three Graces ; Bacchus, the Maenads, the Panthers, 
the Fauns ; and I owe very hearty thanks to 
Apollo. 

Yet again, I see that writers are for ever anxious 
of their style, thinking (not saying) — 

" True, I used ' and which ' on page 47, but 
Martha Brown the stylist gave me leave ; " or : 



PRAISE OF THIS BOOK xi 

" What if I do end a sentence with a preposition ? 
I always follow the rules of Mr. Twist in his 
' 'T is Thus 'T was Spoke,' Odd's Body an' I do 
not ! " 

Now this is a pusillanimity of theirs (the book 
writers) that they think style power, and yet never 
say as much in their Prefaces. Come, let me do so 
. . . Where are you? Let me marshal you, my 
regiments of words ! 

Rabelais ! Master of all happy men ! Are you 
sleeping there pressed into desecrated earth under 
the doss-house of the Rue St. Paul, or do you 
not rather drink cool wine in some elysian Chinon 
looking on the Vienne where it rises in Paradise? 
Are you sleeping or drinking that you will not lend 
us the staff of Friar John wherewith he slaughtered 
and bashed the invaders of the vineyards, who are 
but a parable for the mincing pedants and blood- 
less thin-faced rogues of the world ? 

Write as the wind blows and command all words 
like an army ! See them how they stand in rank 
ready for assault, the jolly, swaggering fellows ! 

First come the Neologisms, that are afraid of no 
man ; fresh, young, hearty, and for the most part 
very long-limbed, though some few short and strong. 



xii PRAISE OF THIS BOOK 

There also are the Misprints to contuse the enemy 
at his onrush. Then see upon the flank a company 
of picked Ambiguities covering what shall be a feint 
by the squadron of Anachronisms led by old Ana- 
chronos himself; a terrible chap with nigglers and 
a great murderer ot tools. 

But here see more deeply massed the ten thousand 
Egotisms shining in their armour and roaring for 
battle. They care for no one. They stormed 
Convention yesterday and looted the cellar of Good- 
Manners, who died of fear without a wound ; so they 
drank his wine and are to-day as strong as lions and 
as careless (saving only their Captain, Monologue, 
who is lantern-jawed). 

Here are the Aposiopaesian Auxiliaries, and 
Dithyramb that killed Punctuation in open fight ; 
Parenthesis the giant and champion of the host, and 
Anacoluthon that never learned to read or write but 
is very handy with his sword ; and Metathesis and 
Hendiadys, two Greeks. And last come the noble 
Gallicisms prancing about on their light horses: 
cavalry so sudden that the enemy sicken at the mere 
sight of them and are overcome without a blow. 
Come then, my hearties, my lads, my indefatigable 
repetitions, seize vou each his own trumpet that 
hangs at his side and blow the charge ; we shall soon 



PRAISE OF THIS BOOK xiii 

drive them all before us headlong, howling down 
together to the Pichrocholian Sea. 

So ! That was an interlude. Forget the 
clamour. 

But there is another matter ; written as yet in no 
other Preface : peculiar to this book. For without 
rhyme or reason, pictures of an uncertain kind 
stand in the pages of the chronicle. Why? 

Because it has become so cheap to photograph on 
zinc. 

In old time a man that drew ill drew not at all. 
He did well. Then either there were no pictures in 
his book, or (if there were any) they were done by 
some other man that loved him not a groat and 
would not have walked half a mile to see him 
hanged. But now it is so easy for a man to scratch 
down what he sees and put it in his book that any 
fool may do it and be none the worse — many others 
shall follow. This is the first. 

Before you blame too much, consider the alterna- 
tive. Shall a man march through Europe dragging 
an artist on a cord ? God forbid ! 

Shall an artist write a book ? Why no, the 
remedy is worse than the disease. 

Let us agree then, that, if he will, any pilgrim 



XIV 



PRAISE OF THIS BOOK 



may tor the future draw (if he likes) that most 
difficult subject, snow hills beyond a grove of trees ; 










that he may draw whatever he comes across in order 
to enliven his mind (tor who saw it if not he ? 
And was it not his loneliness that enabled him to 
see it?), and that he may draw what he never saw, 
with as much freedom as you readers so very con- 
tinually see what you never draw. He may draw 
the morning mist on the Grimsel, six months atter- 
wards ; when he has forgotten what it was like : 
and he may frame it for a masterpiece to make the 
good draughtsman rage. 

The world has grown a boy again this long time 
past, and they are building hotels (I hear) in the 



PRAISE OF THIS BOOK 



XV 



place where Acedes discovered the Water of Youth 
in a hollow of the hill Epistemonoscoptes. 

Then let us love one another and laugh. Time 
passes, and we shall soon laugh no longer — and 
meanwhile common living is a burden, and earnest 
men are at siege upon us all around. Let us suffer 
absurdities, for that is only to surfer one another. 

Nor let us be too hard upon the just but anxious 
fellow that sat down dutifully to paint the soul of 
Switzerland upon a fan. 




THE PATH TO ROME 

When that first Proverb-Maker who has imposed 
upon all peoples by his epigrams and his fallacious 
half-truths, his empiricism and his wanton appeals 
to popular ignorance, I say when this man (for I 
take it he was a man, and a wicked one) was passing 
through France he launched among the French one 
of his pestiferous phrases, " Cen est que le premier pas 
qui coute" ; and this in a rolling-in-the-mouth self- 
satisfied kind of a manner has been repeated since his 
day at least seventeen million three hundred and 
sixty-two thousand five hundred and four times by 
a great mass of Ushers, Parents, Company Officers, 
Elder Brothers, Parish Priests, and authorities in 
general whose office it may be and whose pleasure 
it certainly is to jog up and disturb that native 
slumber and inertia of the mind which is the true 
breeding soil of Revelation. 

For when boys or soldiers or poets, or any other 
blossoms and prides of nature, are for lying steady in 



i THE DIFFICULTY OF BEGINNMNG 

the shade and letting: the Mind commune with its 
Immortal Comrades, up comes Authority busking 
about and eager as though it were a duty to force 
the said Mind to burrow and sweat in the matter 
of this very perishable world, its temporary habi- 
tation. 

"Up," says Authority, "and let me see that 
Mind of yours doing something practical. Let me 
see Him mixing painfully with circumstance, and 
botching up some Imperfection or other that shall 
at least be a Reality and not a silly Fantasy." 

Then the poor Mind comes back to Prison again, 
and the boy takes his horrible Homer in the real 
Greek (not Church's book, alas !) ; the Poet his 
rough hairy paper, his headache, and his cross- 
nibbed pen ; the Soldier abandons his inner pic- 
ture of swaggering about in ordinary clothes, and 
sees the dusty road and feels the hard places in his 
boot, and shakes down again to the steady pressure 
of his pack ; and Authority is satisfied, knowing 
that he will get a smattering from the Boy, a 
rubbishy verse from the Poet, and from the Soldier 
a long and thirsty march. And Authority, when 
it does this, commonly sets to work by one of 
these formulae : as, in England north of Trent, 
by the manifestly false and boastful phrase, " A 



CHARACTER OF PROVERB-MAKER 3 

thing begun is half ended," and in the south 
by "The Beginning is half the Battle"; but in 
France by the words I have attributed to the 
Proverb-Maker, " Ce nest que le premier pas qui 
coute." 

By this you may perceive that the Proverb- 
Maker, like every other Demagogue, Energumen, 
and Disturber, dealt largely in metaphor — but this 
I need hardly insist upon, for in his vast collection 
of published and unpublished works it is amply 
evident that he took the silly pride of the half- 
educated in a constant abuse of metaphor. There 
was a sturdy boy at my school who, when the 
master had carefully explained to us the nature 
of metaphor, said that so far as he could see a 
metaphor was nothing but a long Greek word for 
a lie. And certainly men who know that the mere 
truth would be distasteful or tedious commonly 
have recourse to metaphor, and so do those false 
men who desire to acquire a subtle and unjust 
influence over their fellows, and chief among them, 
the Proverb-Maker. For though his name is lost 
in the great space of time that has passed since he 
flourished, yet his character can be very clearly 
deduced from the many literary fragments he has 
left, and that is found to be the character of a 



4 CHARACTER OF PROVERB-MA KIR 

pusillanimous and ill-bred usurer, wholly lacking 
in foresight, in generous enterprise, and chivalrous 
enthusiasm — in matters of the Faith a prig or a 
doubter, in matters of adventure a poltroon, in 
matters of Science an ignorant Parrot, and in 
Letters a wretchedly bad rhymester, with a vice for 
alliteration ; a wilful liar (as, for instance, " The 
longest way round is the shortest way home"), a 
startling miser (as, " A penny saved is a fenny 
earned"), one ignorant of largesse and human 
charity (as, " Waste not, want not"), and a shocking 
boor in the point of honour (as, " Hard words 
break no bones " — he never fought, I see, but 
with a cudgel). 

But he had just that touch of slinking humour 
which the peasants have, and there is in all he said 
that exasperating quality for which we have no 
name, which certainly is not accuracy, and which is 
quite the opposite of judgment, yet which catches 
the mind as brambles do our clothes, causing us 
continually to pause and swear. For he mixes up 
unanswerable things with false conclusions, he is 
perpetually letting the cat out of the bag and 
exposing our tricks, putting a colour to our actions, 
disturbing us with our own memory, indecently 
revealing corners of the soul. He is like those 



HIS PARTIAL SUCCESSES 5 

men who say one unpleasant and rude thing about 
a friend, and then take refuge from their disloyal 
and false action by pleading that this single accusa- 
tion is true ; and it is perhaps for this abominable 
logicality of his and for his malicious cunning 
that I chiefly hate him : and since he himself 
evidently hated the human race, he must not 
complain if he is hated in return. 

Take, for instance, this phrase that set me 
writing, " Ce nest que le premier pas qui coiite." It 
is false. Much after a beginning is difficult, as 
everybody knows who has crossed the sea, and as 
for the first step a man never so much as remem- 
bers it; if there is difficulty it is in the whole 
launching of a thing, in the first ten pages of a 
book, or the first half-hour of listening to a ser- 
mon, or the first mile of a walk. The first step 
is undertaken lightly, pleasantly, and with your 
soul in the sky ; it is the five-hundredth that 
counts. But I know, and you know, and he 
knew (worse luck) that he was saying a thorny 
and catching thing when he made up that phrase. 
It worries one of set purpose. It is as though one 
had a voice inside one saying : — 

" I know you, you will never begin anything. 
Look at what you might have done ! Here you 



6 THE SHAME OF INDOLENCE 

are, already twenty-one, and you have not yet 
written a dictionary. What will you do for fame? 
Eh? Nothing: you are intolerably lazy — and 
what is worse, it is your fate. Beginnings are 
insuperable barriers to you. What about that 
great work on The National Debt? What about 
that little lyric on Winchelsea that you thought 
of writing six years ago ? Why are the few lines 
still in your head and not on paper? Because 
you can't begin. However, never mind, you can't 
help it, it's your one great flaw, and it's fatal. 
Look at Jones! Younger than you by half a year, 
and already on the Evening Yankee taking bribes 
from Company Promoters ! And where are you ? " 
&c, &c, — and so forth. 

So this threat about the heavy task of Begin- 
ning breeds discouragement, anger, vexation, irrita- 
bility, bad style, pomposity and infinitives split from 
helm to saddle, and metaphors as mixed as the 
Carlton. But it is just true enough to remain 
fast in the mind, caught, as it were, by one finger. 
For all things (you will notice) are very difficult 
in their origin, and why, no one can understand. 
Omne Trinum : they are difficult also in the shock 
of maturity and in their ending. Take, for in- 
stance, the Life of Man, which is the Difficulty 



THE GRAND CLIMACTERIC 7 

of Birth, the Difficulty of Death, and the Diffi- 
culty of the Grand Climacteric. 

Lector. What is the Grand Climacteric ? 

Auctor. I have no time to tell you, for it would 
lead us into a discussion on Astrology, and then 
perhaps to a question of physical science, and then 
you would find I was not orthodox, and perhaps 
denounce me to the authorities. 

I will tell you this much ; it is the moment (not 
the year or the month, mind you, nor even the 
hour, but the very second) when a man is grown 
up, when he sees things as they are (that is, back- 
wards), and feels solidly himself. Do I make myself 
clear ? No matter, it is the Shock of Maturity, 
and that must suffice for you. 

But perhaps you have been reading little brown 
books on Evolution, and you don't believe in Catas- 
trophes, or Climaxes, or Definitions ? Eh ? Tell 
me, do you believe in the peak of the Matterhorn, 
and have you doubts on the points of needles ? 
Can the sun be said truly to rise or set, and is 
there any exact meaning in the phrase, " Done 
to a turn " as applied to omelettes ? You know 
there is; and so also you must believe in Cate- 
gories, and you must admit differences of kind 
as well as of degree, and you must accept exact 



8 GRAND CLIMACTERIC IN A BOOK 

definition and believe in all that your fathers did, 
that were wiser men than you, as is easily proved 
if you will but imagine yourself for but one moment 
introduced into the presence of your ancestors, and 
ask yourself which would look the fool. Espe- 
cially must you believe in moments and their im- 
portance, and avoid with the utmost care the 
Comparative Method and the argument of the 
Slowly Accumulating Heap. I hear that some 
scientists are already beginning to admit the reality 
of Birth and Death — let but some brave few make 
an act of Faith in the Grand Climacteric and all 
shall yet be well. 

Well, as I was saying, this Difficulty of Begin- 
ning is but one of three, and is Inexplicable, and 
is in the Nature of Things, and it is very especially 
noticeable in the Art of Letters. There is in every 
book the Difficulty of Beginning, the Difficulty of 
the Turning-Point (which is the Grand Climacteric 
of a Book) 

Lector. What is that in a Book ? 

Auctor. Why, it is the point where the reader 
has caught on, enters into the Book and desires to 
continue reading it. 

Lector. It comes earlier in some books than 
in others. 



DIFFICULTY OF ENDING A BOOK 9 

Auctor. As you say. . . . And finally there 
is the Difficulty of Ending. 

Lector. I do not see how there can be any 
difficulty in ending a book. 

Auctor. That shows very clearly that you 
have never written one, for there is nothing so 
hard in the writing of a book — no, not even the 
choice of the Dedication — as is the ending of it. 
On this account only the great Poets, who are above 
custom and can snap their divine fingers at forms, 
are not at the pains of devising careful endings. 
Thus, Homer ends with lines that might as well 
be in the middle of a passage ; Hesiod, I know not 
how ; and Mr. Bailey, the New Voice from Eurasia, 
does not end at all, but is still going on. 

Panurge told me that his great work on Con- 
chology would never have been finished had it not 
been for the Bookseller that threatened law ; and 
as it is, the last sentence has no verb in it. There 
is always something more to be said, and it is 
always so difficult to turn up the splice neatly at 
the edges. On this account there are regular 
models for ending a book or a Poem, as there are 
for beginning one; but, for my part, I think the 
best way of ending a book is to rummage about 
among one's manuscripts till one has found a bit 



io DEVICES FOR ENDING BOOKS 

of Fine Writing (no matter upon what subject), to 
lead up the last paragraphs by no matter what 
violent shocks to the thing it deals with, to intro- 
duce a row of asterisks, and then to paste on to 
the paper below these the piece of Fine Writing one 
has found. 

I knew a man once who always wrote the end 
of a book first, when his mind was fresh, and so 
worked gradually back to the introductory chapter, 
which (he said) was ever a kind of summary, and 
could not be properly dealt with till a man knew 
all about his subject. He said this was a sovran 
way to write History. But it seems to me that this 
is pure extravagance, for it would lead one at last 
to beginning at the bottom of the last page, like 
the Hebrew Bible and (if it were fully carried out) 
to writing one's sentences backwards till one had 
a style like the London School of Poets: a very 
horrible conclusion. 

However, I am not concerned here with the 
ending of a book, but with its beginning; and I 
say that the beginning of any literary thing is hard, 
and that this hardness is difficult to explain. And 
I say more than this — I say that an interminable 
discussion of the difficulty of beginning a book is 
the worst omen for going on with it, and a trashy 



INTRODUCTORY RAMBLING n 

subterfuge at the best. In the name of all decent, 
common, and homely things, why not begin and 
have done with it ? 

It was in the very beginning of June, at evening, 
but not yet sunset, that I set out from Toul by the 
Nancy gate ; but instead of going straight on past 
the parade-ground, I turned to the right immedi- 
ately along the ditch and rampart, and did not 
leave the fortifications till I came to the road that 
goes up alongside the Moselle. For it was by the 
valley of this river that I was to begin my pilgrim- 
age, since, by a happy accident, the valley of the 
Upper Moselle runs straight towards Rome, though 
it takes you but a short part of the way. What a 
good opening it makes for a direct pilgrimage can 
be seen from this little map, where the dotted line 
points exactly to Rome. There are two bends 
which take one a little out of one's way, and these 
bends I attempted to avoid, but in general, the 
valley, about a hundred miles from Toul to the 
source, is an evident gate for any one walking from 
this part of Lorraine into Italy. And this map is 
also useful to show what route I followed for my 
first three days past Epinal and Remiremont up to 
the source of the river, and up over the great hill, 
the Ballon d'Alsace. I show the river valley like 



12 THE VALLEY OF THE MOSELLE 

a trench, and the hills above it shaded, till the 
mountainous upper part, the Vosges, is put in 
black. I chose the decline of the day for setting 
out, because of the great heat a little before noon 




and four hours after it. Remembering this, I 
planned to walk at night and in the mornings and 
evenings, but how this design turned out you shall 
hear in a moment. 



THE FIRST GARRISON 13 

I had not gone far, not a quarter of a mile, along 
my road leaving the town, when I thought I would 
stop and rest a little and make sure that I had 
started propitiously and that I was really on my 
way to Rome ; so I halted by a wall and looked 
back at the city and the forts, and drew what I 
saw in my book. It was a sight that had taken 
a firm hold of my mind in boyhood, and that will 
remain in it as long as it can make pictures for 
itself out of the past. I think this must be true 
of all conscripts with regard to the garrison in 
which they have served, for the mind is so fresh at 
twenty-one and the life so new to every recruit as 
he joins it, he is so cut off from books and all 
the worries of life, that the surroundings of the 
place bite into him and take root, as one's school 
does or one's first home. And I had been especially 
fortunate since I had been with gunners (notoriously 
the best kind of men) and not in a big place but 
in a little town, very old and silent, with more 
soldiers in its surrounding circle than there were 
men, women, and children within its useless ramparts. 
It is known to be very beautiful, and though I had 
not heard of this reputation, I saw it to be so at 
once when I was first marched in, on a November 
dawn, up to the height of the artillery barracks. 



*4 



THE VIEW OF TOUL 



I remembered seeing then the great hills surround- 
ing it on every side, hiding their menace and protec- 
tion of guns, and in the south and east the silent 
valley where the high forests dominate the Moselle, 
and the town below the road standing in an island 
or ring of tall trees. All this, I say, I had perma- 
nently remembered, and I had determined, whenever 
I could go on pilgrimage to Rome, to make this 




place my starting-point, and as I stopped here 
and looked back, a little way outside the gates, 
I took in again the scene that recalled so much 
laughter and heavy work and servitude and pride 
of arms. 

I was looking straight at the great fort of St. 
Michel, which is the strongest thing on the frontier, 
and which is the key to the circle of forts that 
make up this entrenched camp. One could see 



ON JUSTICE IN ARMIES 15 

little or nothing of its batteries, only its hundreds 
of feet of steep brushwood above the vineyards, 
and at the summit a stunted wood purposely 
planted. Next to it on the left, of equal height, 
was the hog back of the Cote Barine, hiding a 
battery. Between the Cote Barine and my road and 
wall, I saw the rising ground and the familiar 
Barracks that are called (I know not why) the 
Barracks of Justice, but ought more properly to 
be called the Barracks of petty tyrannies and good 
fellowship, in order to show the philosophers that 
these two things are the life of armies; for of all 
the virtues practised in that old compulsory home 
of mine Justice came second at least if not third, 
while Discipline and Comradeship went first ; and 
the more I think of it the more I am convinced 
that of all the suffering youth that was being there 
annealed and forged into soldiery none can have 
suffered like the lawyers. On the right the high 
trees that stand outside the ramparts of the town 
went dwindling in perspective like a palisade, and 
above them, here and there, was a roof showing the 
top of the towers of the Cathedral or of St. Gengoult. 
Ail this I saw looking backwards, and, when I 
had noticed it and drawn it, I turned round again 
and took the road. 



16 CHARMING VILLAGE OF BRUL1 

I had, in a small hag or pocket slung over my 
shoulder, a large piece of bread, halt a pound of 
smoked ham, a sketch-book, two Nationalist papers, 
and a quart of the wine of Brule — which is the 
most famous wine in the neighbourhood of the 
garrison, yet very cheap. And Brule is a very good 
omen for men that are battered about and given to 
despairing, since it is only called Brule on account 
of its having been burnt so often by Romans, 
Frenchmen, Burgundians, Germans, Flemings, Huns 
perhaps, and generally all those who in the last few 
thousand years have taken a short cut at their 
enemies over the neck of the Cote Barine. So 
you would imagine it to be a tumble-down, weak, 
wretched, and disappearing place ; but, so far from 
this, it is a rich and proud village, growing, as I 
have said, better wine than any in the garrison. 
Though Toul stands in a great cup or ring of hills, 
very high and with steep slopes, and guns on all of 
them, and all these hills grow wine, none is so good 
as Brule wine. And this reminds me of a thing 
that happened in the Manoeuvres of 1891, quorum 
pars magna; for there were two divisions employed 
in that glorious and fatiguing great game, and 
more than a gross of guns — to be accurate, a 
hundred and fifty-six — and of these one (the sixth 



STORY OF THE GREAT BARREL 17 

piece of the tenth battery of the eighth — I 
wonder where you all are now ? I suppose I shall 
not see you again ; but you were the best com- 
panions in the world, my friends) was driven by 
three drivers, of whom I was the middle one, and 
the worst, having on my Livret the note " con- 
ducteur mediocre." But that is neither here nor 
there ; the story is as follows, and the moral is that 
the commercial mind is illogical. 

When we had gone some way, clattering through 
the dust, and were well on on the Commercy road, 
there was a short halt, and during this halt there 
passed us the largest Tun or Barrel that ever went 
on wheels. You talk of the Great Tun of Heidel- 
berg, or of those monstrous Vats that stand in cool 
sheds in the Napa Valley, or of the vast barrels in 
the Catacombs of Rheims ; but all these are built 
in situ and meant to remain steady, and there is no 
limit to the size of a Barrel that has not to travel. 
The point about this enormous Receptacle of 
Bacchus and cavernous huge Prison of Laughter, 
was that it could move, though cumbrously, and it 
was drawn very slowly by stupid, patient oxen, who 
would not be hurried. On the top of it sat a 
strong peasant, with a face of determination, as 
though he were at war with his kind, and he kept 



1 8 STORY OF THE GREAT BARREL 

on calling to his oxen, " Han," and " Hu," in the 

tones of a sullen challenge, as he went creaking 
past. Then the soldiers began calling out to him 
singly, " Where are you off to, Father, with all that 
battery?" and "Why carry cold water to Com- 
mercy? They have only too much as it is " ; and 
" What have you got in the little barrelkin, the 
barrellet, the cantiniere's brandy-flask, the gourd, 
the firkin ? " 

He stopped his oxen fiercely and turned round 
to us and said : — 

" I will tell you what I have here. I have so 
many hectolitres of Brule wine which I made myself, 
and which I know to be the best wine there is, and 
I am taking it about to see if I cannot tame and 
break these proud fellows who are for ever beating 
down prices and mocking me. It is worth eight 
'scutcheons the hectolitre, that is, eight sols the 
litre; what do I say? it is worth a Louis a cup: 
but I will sell it at the price I name, and not a 
penny less. But whenever I come to a village 
the innkeeper begins bargaining and chafFering and 
offering six sols and seven sols, and I answer, 
4 Eight sols, take it or leave it,' and when he seems 
for haggling again I get up and drive away. I 
know the worth of my wine, and I will not be 



STORY OF THE GREAT BARREL 19 

beaten down though I have to go out of Lorraine 
into the Barrois to sell it." 

So when we caught him up again, as we did 
shortly after on the road, a sergeant cried as we 
passed, " I will give you seven, seven and a quarter, 
seven and a half," and we went on laughing and 
forgot all about him. 

For many days we marched from this place to 
that place, and fired and played a confused game 
in the hot sun till the train of sick horses was a 
mile long, and till the recruits were all as deaf as 
so many posts ; and at last, one evening, we came 
to a place called Heiltz le Maurupt, which was 
like heaven after the hot plain and the dust, and 
whose inhabitants are as good and hospitable as 
Angels; it is just where the champagne begins. 
When we had groomed and watered our horses, 
and the stable guard had been set, and we had all 
an hour or so's leisure to stroll about in the cool 
darkness before sleeping in the barns, we had a 
sudden lesson in the smallness of the world, for 
what should come up the village street but that 
monstrous Barrel, and we could see by its move- 
ment that it was still quite full. 

We gathered round the peasant, and told him 
how grieved we were at his ill fortune, and agreed 



20 STORY OF THE GREAT BARREL 

with him that all the people ot the Barrois were 
thieves or madmen not to buy such wine for such 
a song. He took his oxen and his barrel to a 
very high shed that stood by, and there he told 
us all his pilgrimage, and the many assaults his 
firmness suffered, and how he had resisted them 
all. There was much more anger than sorrow in 
his accent, and I could see that he was of the 
wood from which tyrants and martyrs are carved. 
Then suddenly he changed and became elo- 
quent : — 

" Oh, the good wine ! If only it were known and 
tasted ! . . . Here, give me a cup, and I will ask 
some of you to taste it, then at least I shall have 
it praised as it deserves. And this is the wine I 
have carried more than a hundred miles, and every- 
where it has been refused ! " 

There was one guttering candle on a little stool. 
The roof of the shed was lost up in the great 
height of darkness; behind, in the darkness, the oxen 
champed away steadily in the manger. The light 
from the candle flame lit his face strongly from 
beneath and marked it with dark shadows. It 
flickered on the circle of our faces as we pressed 
round, and it came slantwise and waned and dis- 
appeared in the immense length of the Barrel. He 



STORY OF THE GREAT BARREL 21 

stood near the tap with his brows knit as upon 
some very important task, and all we, gunners and 
drivers of the battery, began unhooking our mugs 
and passing them to him. There were nearly a 
hundred, and he filled them all ; not in jollity, but 
like a man offering up a solemn sacrifice. We 
also, entering into his mood, passed our mugs 
continually, thanking him in a low tone and keeping 
in the main silent. A few linesmen lounged at the 
door ; he asked for their cups and filled them. 
He bade them fetch as many of their comrades as 
cared to come ; and very soon there was a circulating 
crowd of men all getting wine of Brule and mur- 
muring their congratulations, and he was willing 
enough to go on giving, but we stopped when we 
saw fit and the scene ended. I cannot tell what 
prodigious measure of wine he gave away to us all 
that night, but when he struck the roof of the cask 
it already sounded hollow. And when we had made 
a collection which he had refused, he went to sleep 
by his oxen, and we to our straw in other barns. 
Next day we started before dawn, and I never saw 
him again. 

This is the story of the wine of Brule, and it 
shows that what men love is never money itself 
but their own way, and that human beings love 



22 THE LAKE OF THE MOSELLE 

sympathy and pageant above all things. It also 
teaches us not to be hard on the rich. 

I walked along the valley of the Moselle, and as 
I walked the long evening of summer began to fall. 
The sky was empty and its deeps infinite ; the clear- 
ness of the air set me dreaming. I passed the turn 




where we used to halt when we were learning how 
to ride in front of the guns, past the little house 
where, on rare holidays, the boys could eat a 
matelotte, which is fish boiled in wine, and so on 
to the place where the river is held by a weir and 
opens out into a kind of lake. 

Here I waited for a moment by the wooden 
railing, and looked up into the hills. So far I had 
been at home, and I was now poring upon the last 
familiar thing before I ventured into the high woods 



THE COMING OF EVENING 23 

and began my experience. I therefore took a 
leisurely farewell, and pondered instead of walking 
farther. Everything about me conduced to re- 
miniscence and to ease. A flock of sheep passed 
me with their shepherd, who gave me a good-night. 
I found myself entering that pleasant mood in which 
all books are conceived (but none written) ; I was 
" smoking the enchanted cigarettes " of Balzac, and 
if this kind of reverie is fatal to action, yet it is so 
much a factor of happiness that I wasted in the 
contemplation of that lovely and silent hollow many 
miles of marching. I suppose if a man were alto- 
gether his own master and controlled by no neces- 
sity, not even the necessity of expression, all his 
life would pass away in these sublime imaginings. 

This was a place I remembered very well. The 
rising river of Lorraine is caught and barred, and it 
spreads in a great sheet of water that must be very 
shallow, but that in its reflections and serenity 
resembles rather a profound and silent mere. The 
steeps surrounding it are nearly mountainous, and 
are crowned with deep forests in which the province 
reposes, and upon which it depends for its local 
genius. A little village which we used to call 
"St. Peter of the Quarries," lies up on the right 
between the steep and the water, and just where 



24 THE GOOD-NIGHT IN THE VALLEY 

the hills end a flat that was once marshy and is 
now half fields, half ponds, but broken with 
luxuriant trees, marks the great age of its civili- 
sation. Along this flat runs, bordered with rare 
poplars, the road which one can follow on and on 
into the heart of the Vosges. I took from this 
silence and this vast plain of still water the repose 
that introduces night. It was all consonant with 
what the peasants were about : the return from 
labour, the bleating folds, and the lighting of lamps 
under the eaves. In such a spirit I passed along 
the upper valley to the spring of the hills. 

In St. Pierre it was just that passing of daylight 
when a man thinks he can still read ; when the 
buildings and the bridges are great masses of purple 
that deceive one, recalling the details of daylight, 
but when the night birds, surer than men and less 
troubled by this illusion of memory, have discov- 
ered that their darkness has conquered. 

The peasants sat outside their houses in the 
twilight accepting the cool air ; every one spoke 
to me as I marched through, and I answered them 
all, nor was there in any of their salutations the 
omission of good fellowship or of the name of 
God. Saving with one man, who was a sergeant 
of artillery on leave, and who cried out to me 



THE NIGHT IN THE FOREST 25 

in an accent that was very familiar and asked me 
to drink, but I told him I had to go up into the 
forest to take advantage of the night since the 
days were so warm for walking. As I left the 
last house of the village I was not secure from 
loneliness, and when the road began to climb up 
the hill into the wild and the trees I was wonder- 
ing how the night would pass. 

With every step upward a greater mystery sur- 
rounded me. A few stars were out, and the brown 
night mist was creeping along the water below, 
but there was still light enough to see the road, 
and even to distinguish the bracken in the deserted 
hollows. The highway became little better than 
a lane ; at the top of the hill it plunged 
under tall pines, and was vaulted over with dark- 
ness. The kingdoms that have no walls, and are 
built up of shadows, began to oppress me as the 
night hardened. Had I had companions, still we 
would only have spoken in a whisper, and in that 
dungeon of trees even my own self would not raise 
its voice within me. 

It was full night when I had reached a vague 
clearing in the woods, right up on the height of 
that flat hill. This clearing was called " The 
Fountain of Magdalen." I was so far relieved by 



26 THE NIGHT IN THE FOREST 

the broader sky of the open field that I could 
wait and rest a little, and there, at last, separate 
from men, I thought of a thousand things. The 
air was full of midsummer, and its mixture of 
exaltation and fear cut me off from ordinary living. 
I now understood why our religion has made sacred 
this season of the year; why we have, a little later, 
the night of St. John, the fires in the villages, and 
the old perception of fairies dancing in the rings of 
the summer grass. A general communion of all 
things conspires at this crisis of summer against us 
reasoning men that should live in the daylight, and 
something fantastic possesses those who are foolish 
enough to watch upon such nights. So I, watch- 
ing, was cut off. There were huge, vague summits, 
all wooded, peering above the field I sat in, but 
they merged into a confused horizon. I was on a 
high plateau, yet I felt myself to be alone with the 
immensity that properly belongs to plains alone. 
I saw the stars, and remembered how I had looked 
up at them on just such a night when I was dose 
to the Pacific, bereft of friends and possessed with 
solitude. There was no noise ; it was full dark- 
ness. The woods before and behind me made a 
square frame of silence, and I was enchased here 
in the clearing, thinking of all things. 



THE NIGHT IN THE FOREST 27 

Then a little wind passed over the vast forests 
of Lorraine. It seemed to wake an indefinite sly 
life proper to this seclusion, a life to which I was 
strange, and which thought me an invader. Yet 
I heard nothing. There were no adders in the long 
grass nor any frogs in that dry square of land, nor 
crickets on the high part of the hill ; but I knew 
that little creatures in league with every nocturnal 
influence, enemies of the sun, occupied the air and 
the land about me ; nor will I deny that I felt a 
rebel, knowing well that men were made to work in 
happy dawns and to sleep in the night, and every- 
thing in that short and sacred darkness multiplied 
my attentiveness and my illusion. Perhaps the 
instincts of the sentry, the necessities of guard, come 
back to us out of the ages unawares during such 
experiments. At any rate the night oppressed and 
exalted me. Then I suddenly attributed such ex- 
altation to the need of food. 

" If we must try this bookish plan of sleeping by 
day and walking by night," I thought, " at least one 
must arrange night meals to suit it." 

I therefore, with my mind still full of the forest, 
sat down and lit a match and peered into my sack, 
taking out therefrom bread and ham and chocolate 
and Brule wine. For seat and table there was a 



28 THE SINGING SOLDIERS 

heathery bank still full of the warmth and savour 
of the last daylight, for companions these great 
inimical influences of the night which 1 had met and 
dreaded, and for occasion or excuse there was hunger. 
Of the Many that debate what shall be done with 
travellers, it was the best and kindest Spirit that 
prompted me to this salutary act. For as I drank 
the wine and dealt with the ham and bread, I felt 
more and more that I had a right to the road ; the 
stars became familiar and the woods a plaything. It 
is quite clear that the body must be recognised and 
the soul kept in its place, since a little refreshing 
food and drink can do so much to make a man. 

On this repast I jumped up merrily, lit a pipe, 
and began singing, and heard, to my inexpressible 
joy, some way down the road, the sound of other 
voices. They were singing that old song of the 
French infantry which dates from Louis XIV., and 
is called "Aupres de ma blonde." I answered their 
chorus, so that, by the time we met under the wood, 
we were already acquainted. They told me they 
had had a forty-eight hours' leave into Nancy, the 
four of them, and had to be in by roll-call at a 
place called Villey the Dry. I remembered it after 
all those years. 

It is a village perched on the brow of one 



THE UNHAPPY VILLAGE 29 

of these high hills above the river, and it found 
itself one day surrounded by earthworks, and a 
great fort raised just above the church. Then, 
before they knew where they were, they learnt 
that (1) no one could go in or out between 
sunset and sunrise without leave of the officer 
in command ; (2) that from being a village they 
had become the " buildings situate within Fort 
No. 18 ;" (3) that they were to be deluged with 
soldiers ; and (4) that they were liable to evacuate 
their tenements on mobilisation. They had become 
a fort unwittingly as they slept, and all their streets 
were blocked with ramparts. A hard fate ; but they 
should not have built their village just on the brow 
of a round hill. They did this in the old days, 
when men used stone instead of iron, because the 
top of a hill was a good place to hold against 
enemies ; and so now, these 73,426 years after, they 
find the same advantage catching them again to 
their hurt. And so things go the round. 

Anyway Villey the Dry is a fort, and there my 
four brothers were going. It was miles off, and they 
had to be in by sunrise, so I offered them a pull of 
my wine, which, to my great joy, they refused, and 
we parted courteously. Then I found the road 
beginning to fall, and knew that I had crossed the 



3 o THE FALLING ROAD 

hills. As the forest ended and the sloping fields 
began, a dim moon came up late in the east in the 
bank of fog that masked the river. So by a sloping 
road, now free from the woods, and at the mouth of 
a fine untenanted valley under the moon, I came 
down again to the Moselle, having saved a great 
elbow by this excursion over the high land. As 1 
swung round the bend of the hills downwards and 
looked up the sloping dell, I remembered that these 
heathery hollows were called " vallons " by the 
people of Lorraine, and this set me singing the 
song of the hunters, " Entends tu dans nos vallons, 
le chasseur sonner du clairon," which I sang loudly 
till I reached the river bank, and lost the exhilara- 
tion of the hills. 

I had now come some twelve miles from my 
starting-place, and it was midnight. The plain, 
the level road ( which often rose a little ), and the 
dank air of the river began to oppress me with 
fatigue. I was not disturbed by this, for I had 
intended to break these nights of marching by occa- 
sional repose, and while I was in the comfort of 
cities — especially in the false hopes that one got 
by reading books — I had imagined that it was a 
light matter to sleep in the open. Indeed, I had 
often so slept when I had been compelled to it in 



THE CRY FOR A BED 31 

Manoeuvres, but I had forgotten how essential was 
a rug of some kind, and what a difference a fire and 
comradeship could make. Thinking over it all, 
feeling my tiredness, and shivering a little in the 
chill under the moon and the clear sky, I was very 
ready to capitulate and to sleep in bed like a Chris- 
tian at the next opportunity. But there is some 
influence in vows or plans that escapes our power 
of rejudgment. All false calculations must be paid 
for, and I found, as you will see, that having said I 
would sleep in the open, I had to keep to it in 
spite of all my second thoughts. 

I passed one village and then another in which 
everything was dark, and in which I could waken 
nothing but dogs, who thought me an enemy, till at 
last I saw a great belt of light in the fog above the 
Moselle. Here there was a kind of town or large 
settlement where there were ironworks, and where, 
as I thought, there would be houses open, even after 
midnight. I first found the old town, where just 
two men were awake at some cooking work or other. 
I found them by a chink of light streaming through 
their door ; but they gave me no hope, only advising 
me to go across the river and try in the new town 
where the forges and the ironworks were. " There," 
they said, " I should certainly find a bed." 



32 THE SUSPICIOUS LION-TAM1.R 

I crossed the bridge, being now much too weary 
to notice anything, even the shadowy hills, and the 
first thing I found was a lot of waggons that be- 
longed to a caravan or fair. Here some men were 
awake, but when I suggested that they should let 
me sleep in their little houses on wheels, they told 
me it was never done ; that it was all they could do 
to pack in themselves ; that they had no straw ; that 
they were guarded by dogs ; and generally gave me 
to understand (though without violence or unpolite- 
ness) that I looked as though I were the man to steal 
their lions and tigers. They told me, however, that 
without doubt I should find something open in the 
centre of the workmen's quarter, where the great 
electric lamps now made a glare over the factory. 

I trudged on unwillingly, and at the very last 
house of this detestable industrial slavery, a high 
house with a gable, I saw a window wide open, and 
a blonde man smoking a cigarette at a balcony. I 
called to him at once, and asked him to let me a 
bed. He put to me all the questions he could 
think of. Why was I there ? Where had I come 
from ? Where (if I was honest) had I intended to 
sleep ? How came I at such an hour on foot ? and 
other examinations. I thought a little what excuse 
to give him, and then, determining that I was too 



THE FULL CURSE 33 

tired to make up anything plausible, I told him the 
full truth ; that I had meant to sleep rough, but 
had been overcome by fatigue, and that I had 
walked from Toul, starting at evening. I conjured 
him by our common Faith to let me in. He told 
me that it was impossible, as he had but one room 
in which he and his family slept, and assured me 
he had asked all these questions out of sympathy 
and charity alone. Then he wished me good-night, 
honestly and kindly, and went in. 

By this time I was very much put out, and began 
to be angry. These straggling French towns give no 
opportunity for a shelter. I saw that I should have 
to get out beyond the market gardens, and that it 
might be a mile or two before I found any rest. 
A clock struck one. I looked up and saw it was 
from the belfry of one of those new chapels which 
the monks are building everywhere, nor did I forget 
to curse the monks in my heart for building them. 
I cursed also those who started smelting works in 
the Moselle valley ; those who gave false advice to 
travellers ; those who kept lions and tigers in cara- 
vans, and for a small sum I would have cursed the 
whole human race, when I saw that my bile had 
hurried me out of the street well into the country- 
side, and that above me, on a bank, was a patch of 

3 



34 ON BREAKFASTS 

orchard and a lane leading up to it. Into this 1 
turned, and, finding a good deal of dry hay lying 
under the trees, I soon made myself an excellent 
bed, first building a little mattress, and then piling 
on hay as warm as a blanket. 

I did not lie awake (as when I planned my pil- 
grimage I had promised myself I would do), look- 
ing at the sky through the branches of trees, but 
I slept at once without dreaming, and woke up to 
find it was broad daylight, and the sun ready to 
rise. Then, stiff" and but little rested by two hours 
of exhaustion, I took up my staff" and my sack and 
regained the road. 

I should very much like to know what those 
who have an answer to everything can say about 
the food requisite to breakfast ? Those great men 
— Marlowe and Jonson, Shakespeare, and Spenser 
before him — drank beer at rising, and tamed it with 
a little bread. In the regiment we used to drink 
black coffee without sugar, and cut off" a great 
hunk of stale crust, and eat nothing more till the 
halt: for the matter of that, the great victories of '93 
were fought upon such unsubstantial meals; for the 
Republicans fought first and ate afterwards, being 
in this quite unlike the Ten Thousand. Sailors, 



ON EARLY WINE 35 

I know, eat nothing for some hours — I mean those 
who turn out at four in the morning; I could give 
the name of the watch, but that I forget it and 
will not be plagued to look up technicalities. 
Dogs eat the first thing they come across, cats take 
a little milk, and gentlemen are accustomed to get 
up at nine, and eat eggs, bacon, kidneys, ham, cold 
pheasant, toast, coffee, tea, scones, and honey, after 
which they will boast that their race is the hardiest 
in the world and ready to bear every fatigue in 
the pursuit of Empire. But what rule governs 
all this ? Why is breakfast different from all other 
things, so that the Greeks called it the best thing 
in the world, and so that each of us in a vague 
way knows that he would eat at breakfast nothing 
but one special kind of food, and that he could not 
imagine breakfast at any other hour in the day ? 

The provocation to this inquiry (which I have 
here no time to pursue) lies in the extraordinary 
distaste that I conceived that morning for Brule 
wine. My ham and bread and chocolate I had 
consumed overnight. I thought, in my folly, that 
I could break my fast on a swig of what had 
seemed to me, only the night before, the best re- 
vivifier and sustenance possible. In the harsh dawn 
it turned out to be nothing but a bitter and intoler- 



36 THE FURTHER VALLEY 

able vinegar. I make no attempt to explain this, 
nor to say why the very same wine that had seemed 
so good in the forest (and was to seem so good 
again later on by the canal) should now repel me. 
I can only tell you that this heavy disappointment 
convinced me of a great truth that a Politician once 
let slip in my hearing, and that I have never since 
forgotten. " Man," said the Director of the State, 
u man is but the creature of circumstanced 

As it was, I lit a pipe of tobacco and hobbled 
blindly along for miles under and towards the 
brightening east. Just before the sun rose I turned 
and looked backward from a high bridge that re- 
crossed the river. The long effort of the night had 
taken me well on my way. I was out of the 
familiar region of the garrison. The great forest- 
hills that I had traversed stood up opposite the dawn, 
catching the new light ; heavy, drifting but white 
clouds, rare at such an hour, sailed above them. 
The valley of the Moselle, which I had never 
thought of save as a half mountainous region, had 
fallen, to become a kind of long garden, whose 
walls were regular, low and cultivated slopes. The 
main waterway of the valley was now not the river 
but the canal that fed from it. 

The tall grasses, the leaves, and poplars bordering 



ENTRY INTO FLAVIGNY 



37 



the river and the canal seemed dark close to me, 
but the valley as a whole was vague, a mass of trees 
with one Lorraine church-tower showing, and the 
delicate slopes bounding it on either side. 




Descending from this bridge I found a sign-post, 
that told me I had walked thirty-two kilometres — 
which is twenty miles — from Toul ; that it was one 
kilometre to Flavigny, and heaven knows how much 
to a place called Charmes. The sun rose in the mist 
that lay up the long even trends of the vale, between 
the low and level hills, and I pushed on my thousand 
yards towards Flavigny. There, by a special provi- 
dence, I found the entertainment and companionship 
whose lack had left me wrecked all these early hours. 



38 ON FRENCH FOLK-LORE 

As I came into Flavigny I saw at once that it was 
a place on which a book might easily be written, 
for it had a church built in the seventeenth century, 
when few churches were built outside great towns, 
a convent, and a general air of importance that 
made of it that grand and noble thing, that primary 
cell of the organism of Europe, that best of all 
Christian associations — a large village. 

I say a book might be written upon it, and there 
is no doubt that a great many articles and pamph- 
lets must have been written upon it, for the French 
are furiously given to local research and reviews, 
and to glorifying their native places; and when 
they cannot discover folk-lore they enrich their 
beloved homes by inventing it. 

There was even a man (I forget his name) who 
wrote a delightful book called " Popular and Tra- 
ditional Songs of my Province," which book, after 
he was dead, was discovered to be entirely his own 
invention, and not a word of it familiar to the 
inhabitants of the soil. He was a large, laughing 
man that smoked enormously, had great masses of 
hair, and worked by night ; also he delighted in the 
society of friends, and talked continuously. I wish 
he had a statue somewhere, and that they would 



HOW TO WRITE RHYMES 39 

pull down to make room for it any one of those 
useless bronzes that are to be found even in the 
little villages, and that commemorate solemn, 
whiskered men, pillars of the state. For surely 
this is the habit of the true poet, and marks the 
vigour and recurrent origin of poetry, that a man 
should get his head full of rhythms and catches, and 
that they should jumble up somehow into short 
songs of his own. What could more suggest (for 
instance) a whole troop of dancing words and lovely 
thoughts than this refrain from the Tourdenoise — 

"... Son beau corps est en terre 
Son ante en Paradis 

Tu ris ? 
Et ris, tu ris, ma Bergere, 
Ris, ma Bergere, tu ris." 

That was the way they set to work in England 
before the Puritans came, when men were not 
afraid to steal verses from one another, and when 
no one imagined that he could live by letters, but 
when every poet took a patron, or begged or robbed 
the churches. So much for the poets. 

Flavigny then, I say (for I seem to be digress- 
ing), is a long street of houses all built together as 
animals build their communities. They are all very 
old, but the people have worked hard since the Revo- 



4 o THE SMELL OF MORNING 

lution, and none of them are poor, nor are any of 
them very rich. I saw but' one gentleman's house, 
and that, I am glad to say, was in disrepair. Most 
of the peasants' houses had, for a ground floor, 
cavernous great barns out of which came a delight- 
ful smell of morning — that is, of hay, litter, oxen, 
and stored grains and old wood ; which is the true 
breath of morning, because it is the scent that all 
the human race worth calling human first meets 
when it rises, and is the association of sunrise in 
the minds of those who keep the world alive : but 
not in the wretched minds of townsmen, and least 
of all in the minds of journalists, who know noth- 
ing of morning save that it is a time of jaded 
emptiness when you have just done prophesying 
(for the hundredth time) the approaching end of 
the world, when the floors are beginning to tremble 
with machinery, and when, in a weary kind of way, 
one feels hungry and alone: a nasty life and usually 
a short one. 

To return to Flavigny. This way of stretching a 
village all along one street is Roman, and is the 
mark of civilisation. When I was at college I was 
compelled to read a work by the crabbed Tacitus on 
the Germans, where, in the midst of a deal that is 
vague and fantastic nonsense and much that is wil- 



THE HAY-MAKING NUNS 41 

ful lying, comes this excellent truth, that barbarians 
build their houses separate, but civilised men to- 
gether. So whenever you see a lot of red roofs 
nestling, as the phrase goes, in the woods of a 
hillside in south England, remember that all that 
is savagery, but when you see a hundred white- 
washed houses in a row along a dead straight road, 
lift up your hearts, for you are in civilisation again. 
But I continue to wander from Flavigny. The 
first thing I saw as I came into the street and noted 
how the level sun stood in a haze beyond, and how 
it shadowed and brought out the slight irregularities 
of the road, was a cart drawn by a galloping donkey, 
which came at and passed me with a prodigious 
clatter as I dragged myself forward. In the cart 
were two nuns, each with a scythe ; they were 
going out mowing, and were up the first in the 
village, as Religious always are. Cheered by this 
happy omen, but not yet heartened, I next met a 
very old man leading out a horse, and asked him if 
there was anywhere where I could find coffee and 
bread at that hour, but he shook his head mourn- 
fully and wished me good-morning in a strong 
accent, for he was deaf and probably thought I was 
begging ; so I went on still more despondent till 
I came to a really merry man of about middle age 



42 THE VALUE OF BAKERS 

who was going to the fields, singing, with a very 
large rake over his shoulder. When I had asked 
him the same question he stared at me a little ami 
said of course coffee and bread could be had at the 
baker's, and when I asked him how I should know 
the baker's he was still more surprised at my 
ignorance, and said, " By the smoke coming from 
the large chimney." This I saw rising a short way 
off on my right, so I thanked him and went and 
found there a youth of about nineteen who sat at 
a fine oak table and had coffee, rum, and a loaf 
before him. He was waiting for the bread in the 
oven to be ready ; and meanwhile he was very 
courteous, poured out coffee and rum for me and 
offered me bread. 

It is a matter often discussed why bakers are such 
excellent citizens and good men. For while it is 
admitted in every country I was ever in that 
cobblers are argumentative and atheists (I except 
the cobbler under Plinlimmon, concerning whom 
would to heaven I had the space to tell you all here, 
for he knows the legends of the mountain), while it 
is public that barbers are garrulous and servile, that 
millers are cheats (we say in Sussex that every honest 
miller has a large tuft of hair on the palm of his 
hand), yet — with every trade in the world having 



THE BAKER BOY 43 

some bad quality attached to it — bakers alone are 
exempt, and every one takes it for granted that they 
are sterling: indeed, there are some societies in 
which, no matter how gloomy and churlish the con- 
versation may have become, you have but to mention 
bakers for voices to brighten suddenly and for 
a good influence to pervade every one. I say this is 
known for a fact, but not usually explained ; the 
explanation is, that bakers are always up early in the 
morning and can watch the dawn, and that in this 
occupation they live in lonely contemplation enjoy- 
ing the early hours. 

So it was with this baker of mine in Flavigny, who 
was a boy. When he heard that I had served at 
Toul he was delighted beyond measure ; he told me 
of a brother of his that had been in the same regi- 
ment, and he assured me that he was himself going 
into the artillery by special enlistment, having got 
his father's leave. You know very little if you 
think I missed the opportunity of making the guns 
seem terrible and glorious in his eyes. I told him 
stories enough to waken a sentry of reserve, and if 
it had been possible (with my youth so obvious) I 
would have woven in a few anecdotes of active 
service and described great shells bursting under my 
horses and the teams shot down, and the gunners all 



44 THE RIDICULOUS TOWN-HALL 

the while impassive ; but as I saw I should not be 
believed I did not speak of such things, but confined 
myself to what he would see and hear when he 
joined. 

Meanwhile the good warm food and the rising 
morning had done two things ; they had put much 
more vigour into me than I had had when I 
slunk in half-an-hour before, but at the same time 
( and this is a thing that often comes with food and 
with rest) they had made me feel the fatigue of so 
long a night. I rose up, therefore, determined to 
find some place where I could sleep. I asked this 
friend of mine how much there was to pay, and he 
said " fourpence." Then we exchanged ritual salu- 
tations, and I took the road. I did not leave the 
town or village without noticing one extraordinary 
thing at the far end of it, which was that, whereas 
most places in France are proud of their town hall 
and make a great show of it, here in Flavigny they 
had taken a great house and written over it Ecole 
Communale in great letters, and then they had 
written over a kind of lean-to or out-house of this 
big place the words "HSteUevm. ■ in very small letters, 
so small that I had a doubt for a moment if the 
citizens here were good republicans — a treasonable 
thought on all this frontier. 



THE HEAT OF MORNING 45 

Then, a mile onward, I saw the road cross the 
canal and run parallel to it. I saw the canal run 
another mile or so under a fine bank of deep woods. 
1 saw an old bridge leading over it to that inviting 
shade, and as it was now nearly six and the sun was 
gathering strength, I went, with slumber overpower- 
ing me and my feet turning heavy beneath me, along 
the tow-path, over the bridge, and lay down on the 
moss under these delightful trees. Forgetful of 
the penalty that such an early repose would bring, 
and of the great heat that was to follow at midday, 
I quickly became part of the life of that forest and 
fell asleep. 

When I awoke it was full eight o'clock, and the 
sun had gained great power. I saw him shining at 
me through the branches of my trees like a patient 
enemy outside a city that one watches through the 
loopholes of a tower, and I began to be afraid of 
taking the road. I looked below me down the 
steep bank between the trunks and saw the canal 
looking like black marble, and I heard the buzzing 
of the flies above it, and I noted that all the mist 
had gone. A very long way off, the noise of its 
ripples coming clearly along the floor of the water, 
was a lazy barge and a horse drawing it. From 



46 THE MORNING MASS 

time to time the tow-rope slackened into the still 
surface, and I heard it dripping as it rose. The 
rest of the valley was silent except for that under- 
humming of insects which marks the strength of 
the sun. 

Now I saw clearly how difficult it was to turn 
night into day, for I found myself condemned either 
to waste many hours that ought to be consumed on 
my pilgrimage, or else to march on under the 
extreme heat; and when I had drunk what was left 
of my Brule wine ( which then seemed delicious ), 
and had eaten a piece of bread, I stiffly jolted down 
the bank and regained the highway. 

In the first village I came to I found that Mass 
was over, and this justly annoyed me; for what is a 
pilgrimage in which a man cannot hear Mass every 
morning ? Of all the things I have read about St. 
Louis which make me wish I had known him to 
speak to, nothing seems to me more delightful than 
his habit of getting Mass daily whenever he marched 
down south, but why this should be so delightful I 
cannot tell. Of course there is a grace and influence 
belonging to such a custom, but it is not of that 
I am speaking but of the pleasing sensation of order 
and accomplishment which attaches to a day one has 
opened by Mass : a purely temporal, and, for all I 



THE MORNING MASS 47 

know, what the monks back at the ironworks would 
have called a carnal feeling, but a source of continual 
comfort to me. Let them go their way and let me 
go mine. 

This comfort I ascribe to four causes (just above 
you will find it written that I could not tell why 
this should be so, but what of that ? ), and these 
causes are : — 

1. That for half-an-hour just at the opening of 
the day you are silent and recollected, and have to 
put off cares, interests, and passions in the repetition 
of a familiar action. This must certainly be a great 
benefit to the body and give it tone. 

1. That the Mass is a careful and rapid ritual. 
Now it is the function of all ritual (as we see in 
games, social arrangements and so forth) to relieve 
the mind by so much of responsibility and initiative 
and to catch you up (as it were) into itself, leading 
your life for you during the time it lasts. In this 
way you experience a singular repose, after which 
fallowness I am sure one is fitter for action and 
judgment. 

3. That the surroundings incline you to good and 
reasonable thoughts, and for the moment deaden the 
rasp and jar of that busy wickedness which both 
working in one's self and received from others is the 



4 8 THE TRADITION OF MANKIND 

true source of all human miseries. Thus the time 
spent at Mass is like a short repose in a deep and 
well-built library, into which no sounds come and 
where you feel yourself secure against the outer 
world. 

4. And the most important cause of this feeling 
of satisfaction is that you are doing what the human 
race has done for thousands upon thousands upon 
thousands of years. This is a matter of such 
moment that I am astonished people hear of it so 
little. Whatever is buried right into our blood 
from immemorial habit that we must be certain to 
do if we are to be fairly happy (of course no grown 
man or woman can really be very happy for long — 
but I mean reasonably happy), and, what is more im- 
portant, decent and secure of our souls. Thus one 
should from time to time hunt animals, or at the 
very least shoot at a mark ; one should always drink 
some kind of fermented liquor with one's food — and 
especially deeply upon great feast-days ; one should 
go on the water from time to time ; and one should 
dance on occasions ; and one should sing in chorus. 
For all these things man has done since God put him 
into a garden and his eyes first became troubled with 
a soul. Similarly some teacher or ranter or other, 
whose name I forget, said lately one very v.'ise thing 



ON ORDINARY LIVING 49 

at least, which was that every man should do a little 
work with his hands. 

Oh ! what good philosophy this is, and how much 
better it would be if rich people instead of raining 
the influence of their rank and spending their money 
on leagues for this or that exceptional thing, were to 
spend it in converting the middle-class to ordinary 
living and to the tradition of the race. Indeed, if I 
had power for some thirty years I would see to it 
that people should be allowed to follow their inbred 
instincts in these matters, and should hunt, drink, 
sing, dance, sail, and dig, and those that would not 
should be compelled by force. 

Now in the morning Mass you do all that the race 
needs to do and has done for all these ages where 
religion was concerned : there you have the sacred 
and separate Enclosure, the Altar, the Priest in his 
Vestments, the set ritual, the ancient and hierachic 
tongue, and all that your nature cries out for in the 
matter of worship. 

From these considerations it is easy to understand 
how put out I was to find Mass over on this first 
morning of my pilgrimage. And I went along the 
burning road in a very ill-humour till I saw upon 
my right, beyond a low wall and in a kind of park, a 
house that seemed built on some artificial raised 

4 



5° 



THE SENSIBLE SQUIRE 




fc 



»/,;--" 



ground surrounded by a wall, but this may have 
been an illusion, the house being really only very 

tall. At any rate I drew it, 
and in the village just beyond 
it I learnt something curious 
about the man that owned it. 
For I had gone into a house 
to take a third meal of bread 
and wine and to replenish my 
bottle when the old woman of 
the house, who was a kindly person, told me she 
had just then no wine. " But," said she, "Mr. So 
and so that lives in the big house sells it to any one 
who cares to buy even in the smallest quantities, 
and you will see his shed standing by the side of 
the road." 

Everything happened just as she had said. I 
came to the big shed by the park wall, and there 
was a kind of counter made of boards, and several 
big tuns and two men : one in an apron serving, and 
the other in a little box or compartment writing. I 
was somewhat timid to ask for so little as a quart, but 
the apron man in the most business-like way filled 
my bottle at a tap and asked for fourpence. He 
was willing to talk, and told me many things : of 
good years in wine, of the nature of their trade, of 



THE REPUBLICAN WINE-SELLER 51 

the influence of the moon on brewing, of the im- 
portance of spigots, and what not ; but when I tried 
to get out of him whether the owner were an 
eccentric private gentleman or a merchant that had 
the sense to earn little pennies as well as large ones, 
I could not make him understand my meaning ; for 
his idea of rank was utterly different from mine and 
took no account of idleness and luxury and daftness, 
but was based entirely upon money and clothes. 
Moreover we were both of us Republicans, so the 
matter was of no great moment. Courteously 
saluting ourselves we parted, he remaining to sell 
wine and I hobbling to Rome, now a little painfully 
and my sack the heavier by a quart of wine, which, 
as you probably know, weighs almost exactly two 
pounds and a half. 

It was by this time close upon eleven, and I had 
long reached the stage when some kinds of men 
begin talking of Dogged Determination, Bull-dog 
pluck, the stubborn blood of the island race, and so 
forth, but when those who can boast a little of the 
sacred French blood are in a mood of set despair 
(both kinds march on, and the mobility of either 
infantry is much the same), I say I had long got to 
this point of exhaustion when it occurred to me 
that I should need an excellent and thorough meal 



5 2 



THE LAST MILE 



at midday. But on looking at my map I found 
that there was nothing nearer than this town of 
Charmes that was marked on the milestones, and 
that was the first place I should come to in the 
department of the Vosges. 

It would take much too long to describe the 
dodges that weary men and stiff have recourse to 
when they are at the close of a difficult task : how 



=^tU» 




they divide it up in lengths in their minds, how they 
count numbers, how they begin to solve problems 
in mental arithmetic : I tried them all. Then I 
thought of a new one, which is really excellent and 
which I recommend to the whole world. It is to 
vary the road, suddenly taking now the fields, now 
the river, but only occasionally the turnpike. This 
last lap was very well suited for such a method. 
The valley had become more like a wide and shallow 
trench than ever. The hills on either side were low 



CHARMES 53 

and exactly even. Up the middle of it went the river, 
the canal and the road, and these two last had only 
a field between them ; now broad, now narrow. 

First on the tow-path, then on the road, then on 
the grass, then back on the tow-path, I pieced out the 
last baking mile into Charmes that lies at the foot 
of a rather higher hill, and at last was dragging 
myself up the street just as the bell was ringing the 
noon Angelus ; nor, however tedious you may have 
found it to read this final effort of mine, can you 
have found it a quarter as wearisome as I did to 
walk it ; and surely between writer and reader there 
should be give and take, now the one furnishing the 
entertainment and now the other. 

The delightful thing in Charmes is its name. Of 
this name I had indeed been thinking as I went 
along the last miles of that dusty and deplorable 
road — that a town should be called " Charms." 

Not but that towns if they are left to themselves 
and not hurried have a way of settling into right 
names suited to the hills about them and recalling 
their own fields. I remember Sussex, and as I re- 
member it I must, if only for example, set down my 
roll-call of such names, as — Fittleworth, where the 
Inn has painted panels ; Amberley in the marshes ; 



54 THE NAMES OF SUSSEX 

delicate Fernhurst, and Ditchling under its hill ; 
Arundel, that is well known to every one ; and 
Climping, that no one knows, set on a lonely beach 
and lost at the vague end of an impassable road .; 
and Barlton, and Burton, and Duncton, and Cold- 
watham that stand under in the shadow and look 
up at the great downs; and Petworth, where the 
spire leans sideways ; and Timberley, that the floods 
make into an island ; and No Man's Land, where 
first there breaks on you the distant sea. I never 
knew a Sussex man yet but, if you noted him such 
a list, would answer : " There I was on such and 
such a day ; this I came to after such and such a 
run; and that other is my home." But it is not 
his recollection alone which moves him, it is sound 
of the names. He feels the accent of them, and all 
the men who live between Hind-head and the Chan- 
nel know these names stand for Eden ; the noise 
is enough to prove it. So it is also with the hidden 
valleys of the He de France; and when you say 
Jouy or Chevreuse to a man that was born in those 
shadows he grows dreamy — yet they are within a 
walk of Paris. 

But the wonderful thing about a name like 
Charmes is that it hands down the dead. For some 
dead man gave it a keen name proceeding from his 



THE DESOLATE JUNCTION 55 

own immediate delight, and made general what had 
been a private pleasure, and, so to speak, be- 
queathed a poem to his town. They say the Arabs 
do this ; calling one place " the rest of the warriors," 
and another " the end," and another " the surprise 
of the horses " : let those who know them speak 
for it. I at least know that in the west of the Co- 
tentin (a sea-garden) old Danes married to Gaulish 
women discovered the just epithet, and that you 
have " St. Mary on the Hill " and " High Town 
under the Wind " and " The Borough over the. 
Heath," which are to-day exactly what their name 
describes them. If you doubt that England has 
such descriptive names, consider the great Truth 
that at one junction on a railway where a mournful 
desolation of stagnant waters and treeless, stone- 
walled fields threatens you with experience and awe, 
a melancholy porter is told off to put his head into 
your carriage and to chant like Charon, " Change 
here for Ashton under the Wood, Moreton on the 
Marsh, Bourton on the Water, and Stow in the 
Wold." 

Charmes does not fulfil its name nor preserve 
what its forgotten son found so wonderful in it. 
For at luncheon there a great commercial traveller 
told me fiercely that it was chiefly known for its 



56 NATURE OF TEMPTING DEVILS 

breweries, and that he thought it of little account. 
Still even in Charmes I found one marvellous 
corner of a renaissance house, which I drew ; but 
as I have lost the drawing, let it go. 

When I came out from the inn of Charmes the 
heat was more terrible than ever, and the prospect 
of a march in it more intolerable. My head hung, 
I went very slowly, and I played with cowardly 
thoughts, which were really (had I known it) good 
angels. I began to look out anxiously for woods, 
but saw only long whitened walls glaring in the sun, 
or, if ever there were trees, they were surrounded 
by wooden palisades which the owners had put 
there. But in a little time (now I had definitely 
yielded to temptation) I found a thicket. 

You must know that if you yield to entertaining 
a temptation, there is the opportunity presented to 
you like lightning. A theologian told me this, and 
it is partly true : but not of Mammon or Belphegor, 
or whatever Devil it is that overlooks the Currency 
(I can see his face from here) : for how many have 
yielded to the Desire of Riches and professed them- 
selves very willing to revel in them, yet did not get 
an opportunity worth a farthing till they died ? 
Like those two beggars that Rabelais tells of, one 
of whom wished for all the gold that would pay 



THE DEVIL INDOLENCE 57 

for all the merchandise that had ever been sold in 
Paris since its first foundation, and the other for 
as much gold as would go into all the sacks that 
could be sewn by all the needles (and those of 
the smallest size) that could be crammed into 
Notre-Dame from the floor to the ceiling, filling 
the smallest crannies. Yet neither had a crust that 
night to rub his gums with. 

Whatever Devil it is, however, that tempts men 
to repose — and for my part I believe him to be 
rather an JEon than a Devil : that is, a good-natured 
fellow working on his own account neither good 
nor ill — whatever being it is, it certainly suits one's 
mood, for I never yet knew a man determined to be 
lazy that had not ample opportunity afforded him, 
though he were poorer than the cure of Maigre, 
who formed a syndicate to sell at a scutcheon a gross 
such souls as were too insignificant to sell singly. 
A man can always find a chance for doing nothing 
as amply and with as ecstatic a satisfaction as the 
world allows, and so to me (whether it was there 
before I cannot tell, and if it came miraculously, so 
much the more amusing) appeared this thicket. It 
was to the left of the road ; a stream ran through 
it in a little ravine ; the undergrowth was thick 
beneath its birches, and just beyond, on the plain 



58 I FALL LAME 

that bordered it, were reapers reaping in a field. I 
went into it contentedly and slept till evening my 
third sleep; then refreshed by the cool wind that 
went before the twilight, I rose and took the road 
again, but I knew I could not go far. 

I was now past my fortieth mile, and though the 
heat had gone, yet my dead slumber had raised a 
thousand evils. I had stiffened to lameness, and 
had fallen into the mood when a man desires com- 
panionship and the talk of travellers rather than 
the open plain. But (unless I went backward, 
which was out of the question) there was nowhere 
to rest in for a long time to come. The next 
considerable village was Thayon, which is called 
" Thayon of the Vosges," because one is nearing 
the big hills, and thither therefore I crawled mile 
after mile. 

But my heart sank. First my foot limped, and 
then my left knee oppressed me with a sudden 
pain. I attempted to relieve it by leaning on my 
right leg, and so discovered a singular new law in 
medicine which I will propose to the scientists. 
For when those excellent men have done investi- 
gating the twirligigs of the brain to find out where 
the soul is, let them consider this much more prac- 
tical matter, that you cannot relieve the pain in one 



RELIGION OF THE LAUNDRY 59 

limb without driving it into some other; and so I 
exchanged twinges in the left knee for a horrible 
great pain in the right. I sat down on a bridge, 
and wondered ; I saw before me hundreds upon 
hundreds of miles, painful and exhausted, and I 
asked heaven if this was necessary to a pilgrimage. 
(But, as you shall hear, a pilgrimage is not wholly 
subject to material laws, for when I came to Epinal 
next day I went into a shop which, whatever it was 
to the profane, appeared to me as a chemist's shop, 
where I bought a bottle of some stuff called "balm," 
and rubbing myself with it was instantly cured.) 

Then I looked down from the bridge across the 
plain and saw, a long way off beyond the railway, 
the very ugly factory village of Thayon, and 
reached it at last, not without noticing that the 
people were standing branches of trees before their 
doors, and the little children noisily helping to 
tread the stems firmly into the earth. They told 
me it was for the coming of Corpus Christi, and so 
proved to me that religion, which is as old as these 
valleys, would last out their inhabiting men. Even 
here, in a place made by a great laundry, a modern 
industrial row of tenements, all the world was 
putting out green branches to welcome the Pro- 
cession and the Sacrament and the Priest. Com- 



60 VOWS THOROUGHLY BROKEN 

forted by this evident refutation of the sad nonsense 
I had read in Cities from the pen of intellec- 
tuals — nonsense I had known to be nonsense, 
but that had none the less tarnished my mind — I 
happily entered the inn, eat and drank, praised 
God, and lay down to sleep in a great bed. I 
mingled with my prayers a firm intention of doing 
the ordinary things, and not attempting impossi- 
bilities, such as marching by night, nor following 
out any other vanities of this world. Then, having 
cast away all theories of how a pilgrimage should 
be conducted, and broken five or six vows, I 
slept steadily till the middle of the morning. I 
had covered fifty miles in twenty-five hours, and if 
you imagine this to be but two miles an hour, you 
must have a very mathematical mind, and know 
little of the realities of living. I woke and "threw 
my shutters open to the bright morning and the 
masterful sun, took my coffee, and set out once 
more towards Epinal, the stronghold a few miles 
away — delighted to see that my shadow was so 
short and the road so hot to the feet and eyes. For 
I said, " This at least provec that I am doing like 
all the world, and walking during the day." 

It was but a couple of hours to the great garrison. 
In a little time I passed a battery. Then a captain 



OF MOUNTAIN TOWNS 61 

went by on a horse, with his orderly behind him. 
Where the deep lock stands by the roadside — the 
only suggestion of coolness — I first heard the 
bugles ; then I came into the long street and deter- 
mined to explore Epinal, and to cast aside all haste 
and folly. 

There are many wonderful things in Epinal. 
As, for instance, that it was evidently once, like 
Paris and Melun and a dozen other strongholds of 
the Gauls, an island city. For the rivers of France 
are full of long, habitable islands, and these were 
once the rallying-places of clans. Then there are 
the forts which are placed on high hills round the 
town and make it even stronger than Toul ; for 
Epinal stands just where the hills begin to be very 
high. Again, it is the capital of a mountain district, 
and this character always does something peculiar 
and impressive to a town. You may watch its 
effect in Grenoble, in little Aubusson, and, rather 
less, in Geneva. 

For in such towns three quite different kinds 
of men meet. First there are the old plain-men, 
who despise the highlanders and think themselves 
much grander and more civilised ; these are the 
burgesses. Then there are the peasants and wood- 



62 EPINAL CHURCH 

cutters who come in from the hill-country to 
market, and who are suspicious of the plain-men 
and yet proud to depend upon a real town with a 
bishop and paved streets. Lastly, there are the 
travellers who come there to enjoy the mountains 
and to make the city a base for their excursions, and 
these love the hill-men and think they understand 
them, and they despise the plain-men for being so 
middle-class as to lord it over the hill-men : but in 
truth this third class, being outsiders, are equally 
hated and despised by both the others, and there is 
a combination against them and they are exploited. 

And there are many other things in which Epinal 
is wonderful, but in nothing is it more wonderful 
than in its great church. 

I suppose that the high Dukes of Burgundy 
and Lorraine and the rich men from Flanders and 
the House of Luxemburg and the rest, going to 
Rome, the centre of the world, had often to pass 
up this valley of the Moselle, which (as I have 
said) is a road leading to Rome, and would halt 
at Epinal and would at times give money for its 
church ; with this result, that the church belongs 
to every imaginable period and is built anyhow, 
in twenty styles, but stands as a whole a most 
enduring record of past forms and of what has 



EPINAL CHURCH 63 

pleased the changing mind when it has attempted 
to worship in stone. 

Thus the transept is simply an old square barn 
of rough stone, older, I suppose, than Charlemagne 
and without any ornament. In its lower courses I 
thought I even saw the Roman brick. It had once 
two towers, northern and southern ; the southern is 
ruined and has a wooden roof, the northern remains 
and is just a pinnacle or minaret too narrow for 
bells. 

Then the apse is pure and beautiful Gothic 
of the fourteenth century with very tall and fluted 
windows like single prayers. The ambulatory is per- 
fectly modern, Gothic also, and in the manner that 
Viollet le Due in France and Pugin in England 
have introduced to bring us back to our origins 
and to remind us of the place whence all we Euro- 
peans came. Again, this apse and ambulatory are 
not perpendicular to the transept, but set askew, 
a thing known in small churches and said to be 
a symbol, but surely very rare in large ones. The 
western door is purely Romanesque, and has Byzan- 
tine ornaments and a great deep round door. To 
match it there is a northern door still deeper, with 
rows and rows of inner arches full of saints, angels, 
devils, and flowers ; and this again is not straight. 



64 EPINAL CHURCH 

but so built that the arches go aslant as you some- 
times see railway bridges when they cross roads at 
an angle. Finally, there is a central tower which is 
neither Gothic nor Romanesque but pure Italian, 
a loggia, with splendid round airy windows taking 
up all its walls and with a flat roof and eaves. This 
some one straight from the south must have put on 
as a memory of his wanderings. 

The barn-transept is crumbling old grey stone, 
the Romanesque porches are red, like Stfasburg, 
the Gothic apse is old white as our cathedrals are, 
the modern ambulatory is of pure white stone just 
quarried, and thus colours as well as shapes are 
mingled up and different in this astonishing 
building. 

I drew it from that point of view in the market- 
place to the north-east which shows most of these 
contrasts at once, and you must excuse the extreme 
shakiness of the sketch, for it was taken as 
best I could on an apple-cart with my book resting 
on the apples — there was no other desk. Nor 
did the apple-seller mind my doing it, but on 
the contrary gave me advice and praise, saying 
such things as — 

<f Excellent ; you have caught the angle of the 
apse. . . . Come now, darken the edge of that 



THE APPLE MAN 



65 



pillar. ... I fear you have made the tower a 
little confused," and so forth. 




I offered to buy a few apples of him, but he 
gave me three instead, and these, as they incom- 
moded me, I gave later to a little child. 

indeed the people of Epinal, not taking me for 
a traveller but simply for a wandering poor man, 
were very genial to me, and the best good they 

5 



66 BALM 

did me was curing my lameness. For, seeing an 
apothecary's shop as I was leaving the town, I wen 
in and said to the apothecary — 

" My knee has swelled and is very painful, and 
I have to walk far ; perhaps you can tell me how 
to cure it, or give me something that will." 

" There is nothing easier," he said ; " I have 
here a specific for the very thing you complain of." 

With this he pulled out a round bottle, on the 
label of which was printed in great letters, " Balm." 

"You have but to rub your knee strongly and 
long with this ointment of mine," he said, " and 
you will be cured." Nor did he mention any 
special form of words to be repeated as one did it. 

Everything happened just as he had said. When 
I was some little way above the town I sat down 
on a low wall and rubbed my knee strongly and 
long with this balm, and the pain instantly dis- 
appeared. Then, with a heart renewed by this 
prodigy, I took the road again and began walking 
very rapidly and high, swinging on to Rome. 

The Moselle above Epinai takes a bend out- 
wards, and it seemed to me that a much shorter 
way to the next village (which is called Archettes, 
or " the very little arches " because there are no arches 



THE LITTLE RUNNEL 67 

there) would be right over the hill round which the 
river curved. This error came from following 
private judgment and not heeding tradition, here 
represented by the highroad which closely follows 
the river. For though a straight tunnel to Ar- 
chettes would have saved distance, yet a climb 
over that high hill and through the pathless wood 
on its summit was folly. 

I went at first over wide, sloping fields, and some 
hundred feet above the valley I crossed a little 
canal. It was made on a very good system, and 
I recommend it to the riparian owners of the Upper 
Wye, which needs it. They take the water from 
the Moselle (which is here broad and torrential and 
falls in steps, running over a stony bed with little 
swirls and rapids), and they lead it along at an 
even gradient, averaging, as it were, the uneven 
descent of the river. In this way they have a con- 
tinuous stream running through fields that would 
otherwise be bare and dry but that are thus nourished 
into excellent pastures. 

Above these fields the forest went up steeply. 
I had not pushed two hundred yards into its 
gloom and confusion when I discovered that I 
had lost my way. It was necessary to take the 
only guide I had and to go straight upwards 



68 THE MAN IN COLORADO 

wherever the line of greatest inclination seemed 
to lie, for that at least would take me to a summit 
and probably to a view of the valley, whereas if 
I tried to make for the shoulder of the hill (which 
had been my first intention) I might have wandered 
about till nightfall. 

It was an old man in a valley called the Curi- 
cante in Colorado that taught me this, if one lost 
one's way going upwards to make at once along 
the steepest line, but if one lost it going down- 
wards, to listen for water and reach it and follow 
it. I wish I had space to tell all about this old 
man who gave me hospitality out there. He 
was from New England and was lonely, and had 
brought out at great expense a musical box to 
cheer him. Of this he was very proud, and 
though it only played four silly hymn tunes, yet, 
as he and I listened to it, heavy tears came into 
his eyes and light tears into mine, because these 
tunes reminded him of his home. But I have no 
time to do more than mention him and must return 
to my forest. 

I climbed, then, over slippery pine needles and 
under the charged air of those trees, which was 
full of dim, slanting light from the afternoon sun, 
till, nearly at the summit, I came upon a clearing 



THE FALSE BATTERY 69 

which I at once recognised as a military road, lead- 
ing to what we used to call a " false battery," that 
is, a dug-out with embrasures into which guns could 
be placed but in which no guns were. For ever 
since the French managed to produce a really 
mobile heavy gun they have constructed any amount 
of such auxiliary works between the permanent 
forts. These need no fixed guns to be emplaced, 
since the French can use now one such parapet, now 
another, as occasion serves, and the advantage is 
that your guns are never useless, but can always be 
brought round where they are needed, and that thus 
six guns will do more work than twenty used to do. 

This false battery was on the brow of the hill, 
and when I reached it I looked down the slope, over 
the brushwood that hid the wire entanglements, 
and there was the whole valley of the Moselle at 
my feet. 

As this was the first really great height, so this 
was the first really great view that I met with on 
my pilgrimage. I drew it carefully, piece by piece, 
sitting there a long time in the declining sun and 
noting all I saw. Archettes, just below ; the flat 
valley with the river winding from side to side ; the 
straight rows of poplar trees ; the dark pines on 
the hills, and the rounded mountains rising farther 



7 o 



THE GREAT VIEW 



and higher into the distance until the last I saw, far 
off to the south-east, must have been the Ballon 
d'Alsace at the sources of the Moselle — the hill 
that marked the first full stage in my journey and 
that overlooked Switzerland. 

Indeed, this is the peculiar virtue of walking to 
a far place, and especially of walking there in a 




straight line, that one gets these visions of the 
world from hill-tops. 

When I call up for myself this great march I see 
it all mapped out in landscapes, each of which I 
caught from some mountain, and each of which 
joins on to that before and to that after it, till I can 
piece together the whole road. The view here from 
the Hill of Archettes, the view from the Ballon 
d'Alsace, from Glovelier Hill, from the Weissen- 
stein, from the Brienzer Grat, from the Gri nisei, 



THE TROUT INN 71 

from above Bellinzona, from the Principessa, from 
Tizzano, from the ridge of the Apennines, from 
the Wall of Siena, from San Quirico, from Ra- 
dicofani, from San Lorenzo, from Montefiascone, 
from above Viterbo, from Roncigleone, and at last 
from that lift in the Via Cassia, whence one 
suddenly perceives the City. They unroll them- 
selves all in their order till I can see Europe, and 
Rome shining at the end. 

But you who go in railways are necessarily shut 
up in long valleys and even sometimes by the walls 
of the earth. Even those who bicycle or drive see 
these sights but rarely and with no consecution, 
since roads also avoid climbing save where they are 
forced to it, as over certain passes. It is only by 
following the straight line onwards that any one can 
pass from ridge to ridge and have this full picture 
of the way he has been. 

So much for views. I clambered down the hill 
to Archettes and saw, almost the first house, a 
swinging board " At the sign of the Trout of the 
Vosges," and as it was now evening I turned in 
there to dine. 

Two things I noticed at once when I sat down 
to meat. First, that the people seated at that 
inn table were of the middle-class of society, and, 



72 APOLOGY FOR THE MIDDLE CLASS 

secondly, that I, though of their rank, was an im- 
pediment to their enjoyment. For to sleep in 
woods, to march some seventy miles, the latter part 
in a dazzling sun, and to end by sliding down an 
earthy steep into the road stamps a man with all 
that this kind of people least desire to have thrust 
upon them. And those who blame the middle- 
class for their conventions in such matters, and 
who profess to be above the care for cleanliness and 
clothes and social ritual which marks the middle- 
class, are either anarchists by nature or fools who 
take what is but an effect of their wealth for a 
natural virtue. 

I say it roundly ; if it were not for the puncti- 
liousness of the middle-class in these matters all 
our civilisation would go to pieces. They are the 
conservators and the maintainers of the standard, 
the moderators of Europe, the salt of society. 
For the kind of man who boasts that he does 
not mind dirty clothes or roughing it, is either a 
man who cares nothing for all that civilisation has 
built up and who rather hates it, or else (and this 
is much more common) he is a rich man, or 
accustomed to live among the rich, and can afford 
to waste energy and stuff because he feels in a vague 
way that more clothes can always be bought, that at 



APOLOGY FOR THE MIDDLE CLASS 73 

the end of his vagabondism he can get excellent 
dinners, and that London and Paris are full of 
luxurious baths and barber shops. Of all the cor- 
rupting effects of wealth there is none worse than 
this, that it makes the wealthy (and their parasites) 
think in some way divine, or at least a lovely charac- 
ter of the mind, what is in truth nothing but their 
power of luxurious living. Heaven keep us all 
from great riches — I mean from very great riches. 

Now the middle-class cannot afford to buy new 
clothes whenever they feel inclined, neither can they 
end up a jaunt by a Turkish bath and a great feast 
with wine. So their care is always to preserve intact 
what they happen to have, to exceed in nothing, to 
study cleanliness, order, decency, sobriety, and a 
steady temper, and they fence all this round and 
preserve it in the only way it can be preserved, to 
wit, with conventions, and they are quite right. 

I find it very hard to keep up to the demands of 
these my colleagues, but I recognise that they are 
on the just side in the quarrel ; let none of them go 
about pretending that I have not defended them in 
this book. 

So I thought of how I should put myself right 
with these people. I saw that an elaborate story 
(as, that I had been set upon by a tramp who 



74 APPEASEMENT OF MIDDLE CLASS 

forced me to change clothes : that I dressed thus 
for a bet : that I was an officer employed as a spy, 
and was about to cross the frontier into Germany 
in the guise of a labourer : that my doctor forbade 
me to shave — or any other such rhodomontade) : 
I saw, I say, that by venturing upon any such ex- 
cuses I might unwittingly offend some other un- 
known canon of theirs deeper and more sacred 
than their rule on clothes ; it had happened to 
me before now to do this in the course of expla- 
nations. 

So I took another method, and said, as I sat 
down — 

" Pray excuse this appearance of mine. I have 
had a most unfortunate adventure in the hills, 
losing my way and being compelled to sleep out 
all night, nor can I remain to get tidy, as it is 
essential that I should reach my luggage (which is 
at Remiremont) before midnight." 

I took great care to pay for my glass of white 
wine before dinner with a bank note, and I showed 
my sketches to my neighbour to make an impres- 
sion. I also talked of foreign politics, of the coun- 
tries I had seen, of England especially, with such 
minute exactitude that their disgust was soon turned 
to admiration. 



THE CUNNING GUESTS 75 

The hostess of this inn was delicate and courteous 
to a degree, and at every point attempting to over- 
reach her guests, who, as regularly as she attacked, 
countered with astonishing dexterity. 

Thus she would say : " Perhaps the joint would 
taste better if it were carved on the table, or do the 
gentlemen prefer it carved aside ? " 

To which a banker opposite me said in a deep 
voice : " We prefer, madam, to have it carved 
aside." 

Or she would put her head in and say — 

" I can recommend our excellent beer. It is 
really preferable to this local wine." 

And my neighbour, a tourist, answered with 
decision — 

" Madame, we find your wine excellent. It 
could not be bettered." 

Nor could she get round them on a single point, 
and I pitied her so much that I bought bread and 
wine off her to console her, and I let her over- 
charge me, and went out into the afterglow with 
her benediction, followed also by the farewells of 
the middle-class, who were now taking their coffee 
at little tables outside the house. 

I went hard up the road to Remiremont. The 
night darkened. I reached Remiremont at mid- 



j6 OF DORMITORY TREES 

night, and feeling very wakeful I pushed on up the 
valley under great woods of pines ; and at last, 
diverging up a little path, I settled on a clump of 
trees sheltered and, as I thought, warm, and lay 
down there to sleep till morning; but, on the con- 
trary, I lay awake a full hour in the fragrance and 
on the level carpet of the pine needles looking up 
through the dark branches at the waning moon, 
which had just risen, and thinking of how suitable 
were pine-trees for a man to sleep under. 

" The beech," I thought, " is a good tree to sleep 
under, for nothing will grow there, and there is 
always dry beech-mast ; the yew would be good if 
it did not grow so low, but, all in all, pine-trees are 
the best." I also considered that the worst tree to 
sleep under would be the upas-tree. These thoughts 
so nearly bordered on nothing that, though I was not 
sleepy, yet I fell asleep. Long before day, the moon 
being still lustrous against a sky that yet contained 
a few faint stars, I awoke shivering with cold. 

In sleep there is something diminishes us. This 
every one has noticed ; for who ever suffered a night- 
mare awake, or felt in full consciousness those awful 
impotencies which lie on the other side of slumber? 
When we lie down we give ourselves voluntarily, 
yet by the force of nature, to powers before which 



THE COLD OF SLEEP 77 

we melt and are nothing. And among the strange 
frailties of sleep I have noticed cold. 

Here was a warm place under the pines where I 
could rest in great comfort on pine needles still full 
of the day; a covering for the beasts underground 
that love an even heat — the best of floors for a 
tired man. Even the slight wind that blew under 
the waning moon was warm, and the stars were 
languid and not brilliant, as though everything 
were full of summer, and I knew that the night 
would be short ; a midsummer night ; and I had 
lived half of it before attempting repose. Yet, I 
say, I woke shivering and also disconsolate, needing 
companionship. I pushed down through tall, rank 
grass, drenched with dew, and made my way across 
the road to the bank of the river. By the time I 
reached it the dawn began to occupy the east. 

For a long time I stood in a favoured place, just 
above a bank of trees that lined the river, and 
watched the beginning of the day, because every 
slow increase of light promised me sustenance. 

The faint, uncertain glimmer that seemed not so 
much to shine through the air as to be part of it, 
took all colour out of the woods and fields and the 
high slopes above me, leaving them planes of grey 
and deeper grey. The woods near me were a 



78 



THE DAWN 



silhouette, black and motionless, emphasising the 
east beyond. The river was white and dead, not 
even a steam rose from it, but out of the further 
pastures a gentle mist had lifted up and lay all even 




along the flanks of the hills, so that they rose out of 
it, indistinct at their bases, clear-cut above against 
the brightening sky ; and the farther they were the 
more their mouldings showed in the early light, and 
the most distant edges of all caught the morning. 

At this wonderful sight I gazed for quite half-an- 
hour without moving, and took in vigour from it as 
a man takes in food and wine. When I stirred and 
looked about me it had become easy to see the 
separate grasses ; a bird or two had begun little 



THE HILL-MEN 79 

interrupted chirrups in the bushes, a day-breeze 
broke from up the valley ruffling the silence, the 
moon was dead against the sky, and the stars had 
disappeared. In a solemn mood I regained the 
road and turned my face towards the neighbouring 
sources of the river. 

I easily perceived with each laborious mile that I 
was approaching the end of my companionship with 
the Moselle, which had become part of my 
adventure for the last eighty miles. It was now 
a small stream, mountainous and uncertain, though 
in parts still placid and slow. There appeared also 
that which I take to be an infallible accompaniment 
of secluded glens and of the head waters of rivers 
(however canalised or even overbuilt they are), I 
mean a certain roughness all about them and the 
stout protest of the hill-men : their stone cottages 
and their lonely paths off the road. 

So it was here. The hills had grown much 
higher and come closer to the 
river-plain ; up the gullies I 
would catch now and then an 
aged and uncouth bridge with 
a hut near it all built of endur- 
ing stone : part of the hills. 
Then again there were present here and there on 




80 THE SPECIAL CHAPELS 

the spurs lonely chapels, and these in Catholic 
countries are a mark of the mountains and ot the 
end of the riches of a valley. Why this should be 
so I cannot tell. You find them also sometimes in 
forests, but especially in the lesser inlets of the sea- 
coast and, as I have said, here in the upper parts of 
valleys in the great hills. In such shrines Mass 
*"* is to be said but rarely, 
sometimes but once a year 
_ JS5S?*- v -v in a special commemora- 

ka^fe*"**-*** tion. The rest of the 

& *^«83ij8fc* time tne y stan d empty, 
-^vv*T^- and some of the older or 
.' «"*-''^PL simpler, one might take 
for ruins. They mark everywhere some strong 
emotion of supplication, thanks, or reverence, and 
they anchor these wild places to their own past, 
making them up in memories what they lack in 
multitudinous life. 

I broke my fast on bread and wine at a place 
where the road crosses the river, and then I deter- 
mined I would have hot coffee as well, and seeing in 
front of me a village called Rupt, which means " the 
cleft" (for there is here a great cleft in the hillside), 
I went up to it and had my coffee. Then I dis- 
covered a singular thing, that the people of the 




ON LOCAL NAMES 81 

place are tired of making up names and give 
nothing its peculiar baptism. This I thought 
really very wonderful indeed, for I have noticed 
wherever I have been that in proportion as men 
are remote and have little to distract them, in 
that proportion they produce a great crop of 
peculiar local names for every stream, reach, tuft, 
hummock, glen, copse and gully for miles around ; 
and often when I have lost my way and asked 
it of a peasant in some lonely part I have 
grown impatient as he wandered on about " leav- 
ing on your left the stone we call the Nug- 
gin, and bearing round what some call Holy 
Dyke till you come to what they call Mary's 
Ferry "... and so forth. Long-shoremen and 
the riparian inhabitants of dreadful and lonely 
rivers near the sea have just such a habit, and 
I have in my mind's eye now a short stretch 
of tidal water in which there are but five shoals, 
yet they all have names and are called " The 
House, the Knowle, Goodman's Plot, Mall, and 
the Patch." 

But here in Rupt, to my extreme astonishment 
there was no such universal and human . instinct. 
For I said to the old man who poured me out 
my coffee under the trellis (it was full morning, 



82 THE NAMELESS HILL 

the sun was well up, and the clouds were all dappled 
high above the tops ot the mountains) : " Father, 
what do you call this hill ? " And with that 
I pointed to a very remarkable hill and summit 
that lie sheer above the village. 

"That," he said, "is called the hill over above 
Rupt." 

" Yes, of course," I said, " but what is its 
name ? " 

" That is its name," he answered. 

And he was quite right, for when I looked at 
my map, there it was printed, " Hill above Rupt." 
I thought how wearisome it would be if this 
became a common way of doing things, and if 
one should call the Thames " the River of Lon- 
don," and Essex " the North side," and Kent 
" the South side" ; but considering that this fantas- 
tic method was only indulged in by one wretched 
village, I released myself from fear, relegated 
such horrors to the colonies, and took the road 
again. 

All this upper corner of the valley is a garden. 
It is bound in on every side from the winds, it is 
closed at the end by the great mass of the Ballon 
d' Alsace, its floor is smooth and level, its richness 
is used to feed grass and pasturage, and knots of 



THE YOUTH OF RIVERS 83 

trees grow about it as though they had been planted 
to please the eye. 

Nothing can take from the sources of rivers their 
character of isolation and repose. Here what are 
afterwards to become the influences of the plains 
are nurtured and tended as though in an orchard, 
and the future life of a whole fruitful valley with 
its regal towns is determined. Something about 
these places prevents ingress or spoliation. They 
will endure no settlements save of peasants ; the 
waters are too young to be harnessed; the hills for- 
bid an easy commerce with neighbours. Through- 
out the world I have found the heads of rivers to 
be secure places of silence and content. And as 
they are themselves a kind of youth, the early 
home of all that rivers must at last become — I 
mean special ways of building and a separate state 
of living, a local air and a tradition of history, for 
rivers are always the makers of provinces — so they 
bring extreme youth back to one, and these upper 
glens of the world steep one in simplicity and 
childhood. 

It was my delight to lie upon a bank of the road 
and to draw what I saw before me, which was the 
tender stream of the Moselle slipping through fields 
quite flat and even and undivided by fences j its 



8 4 



THE YOUNG MOSELLE 



banks had here a strange effect of Nature copying 
man's art : they seemed a park, and the river 
wound through it full of the positive innocence 
that attaches to virgins : it nourished and was 
guarded by trees. 




There was about that scene something of crea- 
tion and of a beginning, and as I drew it, it gave 
me like a gift the freshness of the first experiences 
of living and filled me with remembered springs. 
I mused upon the birth of rivers, and how they 



THE PIOUS WOMAN 85 

were persons and had a name — were kings, and 
grew strong and ruled great countries, and how at 
last they reached the sea. 

But while I was thinking of these things, and 
seeing in my mind a kind of picture of The River 
Valley, and of men clustering around their home 
stream, and of its ultimate vast plains on either 
side, and of the white line of the sea beyond all, a 
woman passed me. She was very ugly, and was 
dressed in black. Her dress was stiff and shining, 
and, as I imagined, valuable. She had in her hand 
a book known to the French as " The Roman 
Parishioner," which is a prayer-book. Her hair 
was hidden in a stiff cap or bonnet ; she walked 
rapidly, with her eyes on the ground. When I saw 
this sight it reminded me suddenly, and I cried out 
profanely, " Devil take me ! It is Corpus Christi, 
and my third day out. It would be a wicked 
pilgrimage if I did not get Mass at last." 
For my first day (if you remember) I had slept 
in a wood beyond Mass-time, and my second 
(if you remember) I had slept in a bed. But 
this third day, a great Feast into the bargain, I 
was bound to hear Mass, and this woman hurry- 
ing along to the next village proved that I was 
not too late. 



86 THE JEWS IN THE HILLS 

So I hurried in her wake and came to the village, 
and went into the church, which was very hill, and 
came down out ot it (the Mass was low and short 
— they are a Christian people) through an avenue 
of small trees and large branches set up in front of 
the houses to welcome the procession that was to 
be held near noon. At the foot of the street was 
an inn where I entered to eat, and finding there 
another man — I take him to have been a shop- 
keeper — I determined to talk politics, and began 
as follows : — 

"Have you any anti-Semitism in your town?" 

" It is not my town," he said, "but there is anti- 
Semitism. It flourishes." 

" Why then ? " I asked. " How many Jews have 
you in your town ? " 

He said there were seven. 

"But," said I, "seven families of Jews " 

" There are not seven families," he interrupted ; 
" there are seven Jews all told. There are but two 
families, and I am reckoning in the children. The 
servants are Christians." 

" Why," said I, " that is only just and proper 
that the Jewish families from beyond the frontier 
should have local Christian people to wait on them 
and do their bidding. But what I was going to 



THE STRANGE SACRIFICE 87 

say was that so very few Jews seem to me an insuffi- 
cient fuel to fire the anti-Semites. How does their 
opinion flourish ? " 

" In this way," he answered. " The Jews, you 
see, ridicule our young men for holding such super- 
stitions as the Catholic. Our young men, thus 
brought to book and made to feel irrational, admit 
the justice of the ridicule, but nourish a hatred 
secretly for those who have exposed their folly. 

Therefore they feel a standing grudge against the 

J>> 
ews. 

When he had given me this singular analysis of 
that part of the politics of the mountains, he added, 
after a short silence, the following remarkable 
phrase — 

" For my part I am a liberal, and would have 
each go his own way : the Catholic to his Mass, the 
Jew to his Sacrifice. " 

I then rose from my meal, saluted him, and went 
musing up the valley road, pondering upon what 
it could be that the Jews sacrificed in this remote 
borough, but I could not for the life of me imagine 
what it was, though I have had a great many Jews 
among my friends. 

I was now arrived at the head of this lovely vale, 
at the sources of the river Moselle and the base of 



88 THE BALLON D'ALSACE 

the great mountain the Ballon d'Alsace, which 
closes it in like a wall at the end of a lane. For 
some miles past the hills had grown higher and 
higher upon either side, the valley floor narrower, 
the torrent less abundant; there now stood up be- 
fore me the marshy slopes and the enormous forests 
of pine that forbid a passage south. Up through 
these the main road has been pierced, tortuous and 
at an even gradient mile after mile to the very top 
of the hill ; for the Ballon d'Alsace is so shaped 
that it is impossible for the Moselle valley to com- 
municate with the Gap of Belfort save by some 
track right over its summit. For it is a mountain 
with spurs like a star, and where mountains of 
this kind block the end of main valleys it becomes 
necessary for the road leading up and out of the 
valley to go over their highest point, since any 
other road over the passes or shoulders would in- 
volve a second climb to reach the country be- 
yond. The reason of this, my little map here, 
where the dark stands for the valley and the 
light for the high places, will show better than a 
long description. Not that this map is of the 
Ballon d'Alsace in particular, but only of the 
type of hill I mean. 

Since, in crossing a range, it is usually possible to 



SUMMIT ROADS 



89 



find a low point suitable for surmounting it, such 
summit roads are rare, but when one does get them 








St* 



f 



V J 



'll\ x 



they are the finest travel in the world, for they fur- 
nish at one point (that is, at the summit) what ordi- 
nary roads going through passes can never give you : 
a moment of domination. From their climax you 



9 o THE FOREST IN RANK 

look over the whole world, and you feel your jour- 
ney to be adventurous and your advance to have 
taken some great definite step from one province 
and people to another. 

I would not be bound by the exaggerated zig- 
zags of the road, which had been built for artillery, 
and rose at an easy slope. I went along the bed of 
the dell before me and took the forest by a little 
path that led straight upward, and when the path 
failed, my way was marked by the wire of the 
telegraph that crosses to Belfort. As I rose I 
saw the forest before me grow grander. The pine 
branches came down from the trunks with a greater 
burden and majesty in their sway, the trees took 
on an appearance of solemnity, and the whole rank 
that faced me — for here the woods come to an 
even line and stand like an army arrested upon a 
downward march — seemed something unusual and 
gigantic. Nothing more helped this impression of 
awe than the extreme darkness beneath those aged 
growths and the change in the sky that introduced 
my entry into the silence and perfume of so vast 
a temple. Great clouds, so charged with rain that 
you would have thought them lower than the hills 
(and yet just missing their tops), came covering me 
like a tumbled roof and gathered all around ; the 



THE INNER DARKNESS 91 

heat of the day waned suddenly in their shade: it 
seemed suddenly as though summer was over or as 
though the mountains demanded an uncertain sum- 
mer of their own, and shot the sunshine with the 
chill of their heights. A little wind ran along the 
grass and died again. As I gained the darkness of 
the first trees, rain was falling. 

The silence of the interior wood was enhanced 
by a rare drip of water from the boughs that stood 
out straight and tangled I know not how far above 
me. Its gloom was rendered more tremendous by 
the half-light and lowering of the sky which the 
ceiling of branches concealed. Height, stillness, 
and a sort of expectancy controlled the memories 
of the place, and I passed silently and lightly 
between the high columns of the trees from night 
(as it seemed) through a kind of twilight forward 
to a near night beyond. On every side the per- 
spective of these bare innumerable shafts, each 
standing apart in order, purple and fragrant, 
merged into recesses of distance where all light 
disappeared, yet as I advanced the slight gloaming 
still surrounded me, as did the stillness framed 
in the drip of water, and beneath my feet was the 
level carpet of the pine needles deadening and 
making distant every tiny noise. Had not the trees 



92 THE KNOT OF EUROPE 

been so much greater and more enduring than my 
own presence, and had not they overwhelmed me 
by their regard, I should have felt afraid. As it 
was I pushed upward through their immovable 
host in some such catching of the breath as men 
have when they walk at night straining for a sound, 
and I felt myself to be continually in a hidden 
companionship. 

When I came to the edge of this haunted forest 
it ceased as suddenly as it had begun. I left behind 
me such a rank of trees aligned as I had entered 
thousands of feet below, and I saw before me, 
stretching shapely up to the sky, the round dome- 
like summit of the mountain — a great field of 
grass. It was already evening; and, as though 
the tall trees had withdrawn their virtue from 
me, my fatigue suddenly came upon me. My 
feet would hardly bear me as I clambered up the 
last hundred feet and looked down under the roll- 
ing clouds, lit from beneath by the level light 
of evening, to the three countries that met at my 
feet. 

For the Ballon d' Alsace is the knot of Europe, 
and from that gathering up and ending ot the 
Vosges you look down upon three divisions of 
men. To the right of you are the Gauls. I do 



THE THREE RACES 93 

not mean that mixed breed of Lorraine, silent, 
among the best of people, but I mean the true 
Gauls who are hot, ready, and born in the plains 
and in the vineyards. They stand in their old 
entrenchments on either side of the Saone and 
are vivacious in battle ; from time to time a 
spirit urges them, and they go out conquering 
eastward in the Germanies, or in Asia, or down 
the peninsulas of the Mediterranean, and then 
they suck back like a tide homewards, having 
accomplished nothing but an epic. 

Then on the left you have all the Germanies, a 
great sea of confused and dreaming people, lost 
in philosophies and creating music, frozen for the 
moment under a foreign rigidity, but some day to 
thaw again and to give a word to us others. They 
cannot long remain apart from visions. 

Then in front of you southward and eastward, if 
you are marching to Rome, come the Highlanders. 
I had never been among them, and I was to see 
them in a day ; the people of the high hills, the race 
whom we all feel to be enemies, and who run straight 
across the world from the Atlantic to the Pacific, 
understanding each other, not understood by us. 
I saw their first rampart, the mountains called the 
Jura, on the horizon, and above my great field of 



94 THE INN AT EVENING 

view the clouds still tumbled, lit from beneath with 
evening. 

I tired of these immensities, and, feeling now 
my feet more broken than ever, I very slowly 
and in sharp shoots of pain dragged down the 
slope towards the main road : I saw just below me 




the frontier stones of the Prussians, and imme- 
diately within them a hut. To this I addressed 
myself. 

It was an inn. The door opened of itself, and I 
found there a pleasant woman of middle age, but 
frowning. She had three daughters, all of great 
strength, and she was upbraiding them loudly in 
the German of Alsace and making them scour and 
scrub. On the wall above her head was a great 
placard which I read very tactfully, and in a distant 
manner, until she had restored the discipline of her 
family. This great placard was framed in the three 



THE THRIFTY DEMOCRATS 95 

colours which once brought a little hope to the 
oppressed, and at the head of it in broad black 
letters were the three words, " Freedom, Brother- 
hood, and an Equal Law." Underneath these was 
the emblematic figure of a cock, which I took to 
be the gallic bird, and underneath him again was 
printed in enormous italics — 

" Quand ce coq chant era 
hi credit P on /era.'* 

Which means — 

" When you hear him crowing 
Then 's the time for owing. 
Till that day — 
Pay." 

While I was still wondering at this epitome of 
the French people, and was attempting to combine 
the French military tradition with the French tem- 
per in the affairs of economics ; while I was also 
delighting in the memory of the solid coin that I 
carried in a little leathern bag in my pocket, the 
hard-working, God-fearing, and honest woman that 
governs the little house and the three great daugh- 
ters, within a yard of the frontier, and on the top 
of this huge hill, had brought back all her troops 
into line and had the time to attend to me. This 
she did with the utmost politeness, though cold by 



96 THE COMMON FAITH 

race, and through her politeness ran a sense of what 
Teutons called Duty, which would once have re- 
pelled me ; but I have wandered over a great part 
of the world and 1 know it now to be a distorted 
kind of virtue. 

She was of a very different sort from that good 
tribe of the Moselle valley beyond the hill ; yet she 
also was Catholic — (she had a little tree set up 
before her door for the Corpus Christi : see what 
religion is, that makes people of utterly different 
races understand each other ; for when I saw that 
tree I knew precisely where I stood. So once all 
we Europeans understood each other, but now we 
are divided by the worst malignancies of nations and 
classes, and a man does not so much love his own 
nation as hate his neighbours, and even the twilight 
of chivalry is mixed up with a detestable patronage 

of the poor. But as I was saying ) she also was 

a Catholic, and I knew myself to be with friends. 
She was moreover not exactly of — what shall I say ? 
the words Celtic and Latin mean nothing — not of 
those who delight in a delicate manner ; and her 
good heart prompted her to say, very loudly — 

" What do you want ? " 

" I want a bed," I said, and I pulled out a silver 
coin. " I must lie down at once." 



THE CONFLICTING MINDS 97 

Then I added, " Can you make omelettes ? " 

Now it is a curious thing, and one I will not 
dwell on — 

Lector. You do nothing but dwell. 

Auctor. It is the essence of lonely travel ; and 
if you have come to this book for literature you 
have come to the wrong booth and counter. As 
I was saying : it is a curious thing that some 
people (or races) jump from one subject to another 
naturally, as some animals (I mean the noble deer) 
go by bounds. While there are other races (or 
individuals — heaven forgive me, I am no ethnolo- 
gist) who think you a criminal or a lunatic unless 
you carefully plod along from step to step like a 
hippopotamus out of water. When, therefore, I 
asked this family-drilling, house-managing, moun- 
tain-living woman whether she could make ome- 
lettes, she shook her head at me slowly, keeping 
her eyes fixed on mine, and said in what was the 
corpse of French with a German ghost in it, " The 
bed is a franc." 

" Motherkin," I answered, "what I mean is that 
I would sleep until I wake, for I have come a pro- 
digious distance and have last slept in the woods. 
But when I wake I shall need food, for which," I 
added, pulling out yet another coin, " I will pay 

7 



98 THE SINGLE BEVERAGE 

whatever your charge may be ; for a more delight- 
ful house I have rarely met with. I know most 
people do not sleep before sunset, but I am par- 
ticularly tired and broken." 

She showed me my bed then much more kindly, 
and when I woke, which was long after dusk, she 
gave me in the living room of the hut eggs beaten 
up with ham, and I ate brown bread and said grace. 

Then (my wine was not yet finished, but it is an 
abominable thing to drink your own wine in another 
person's house) I asked whether I could have some- 
thing to drink. 

" What you like," she said. 

"What have you ? " said I. 

" Beer," said she. 

"Anything else?" said I. 

" No," said she. 

" Why, then, give me some of that excellent beer." 

I drank this with delight, paid all my bill (which 
was that of a labourer), and said good-night to 
them. 

In good-nights they had a ceremony ; for they 
all rose together and curtsied. Upon my soul I 
believe such people to be the salt of the earth. I 
bowed with real contrition, for at several moments 
I had believed myself better than they. Then I 



THE SHARP MORNING 99 

went to my bed and they to theirs. The wind 
howled outside ; my boots were stiff like wood 
and I could hardly take them off; my feet were 
so martyrised that I doubted if I could walk at all 
on the morrow. Nevertheless I was so wrapped 
round with the repose of this family's virtues that I 
fell asleep at once. Next day the sun was rising 
in angry glory over the very distant hills of Ger- 
many, his new light running between the pinnacles 
of the clouds as the commands of a conqueror 
might come trumpeted down the defiles of moun- 
tains, when I fearlessly forced my boots on to my 
feet and left their doors. 

The morning outside came living and sharp after 
the gale — almost chilly. Under a scattered but 
clearing sky I first limped, then, as my blood 
warmed, strode down the path that led between the 
trees of the farther vale and was soon following a 
stream that leaped from one fall to another till it 
should lead me to the main road, to Belfort, to the 
Jura, to the Swiss whom I had never known, and 
at last to Italy. 

But before I call up the recollection of that 
hidden valley, I must describe with a map the 
curious features of the road that lay before me 
into Switzerland. I was standing on the summit 



ioo THE TRACK TO SWITZERLAND 

of that knot of hills which rise up from every 
side to form the Ballon d'Alsace, and make an 
abrupt ending to the Vosges. Before me, south- 
ward and eastward, was a great plain with the 
fortress of Belfort in the midst of it. This plain 
is called by soldiers " the Gap of Belfort," and is 
the only break in the hill frontier that covers 
France all the way from the Mediterranean to 
Flanders. On the farther side of this plain run 
the Jura mountains, which are like a northern wall 
to Switzerland, and just before you reach them is 
the Frontier. The Jura are fold on fold of high 
limestone ridges, thousands of feet high, all parallel, 
with deep valleys, thousands of feet deep, between 
them ; and beyond their last abrupt escarpment is 
the wide plain of the river Aar. 

Now the straight line to Rome ran from where I 
stood, right across that plain of Belfort, right across 
the ridges of the Jura, and cut the plain of the Aar 
a few miles to the west of a town called Solothurn 
or Soleure, which stands upon that river. 

It was impossible to follow that line exactly, but 
one could average it closely enough by following 
the highroad down the mountain through Belfort 
to a Swiss town called Porrentruy or Portrut — so 
far one was a little to the west of the direct line. 



THE TRACK TO SWITZERLAND 101 

From Portrut, by picking one's way through 
forests, up steep banks, over open downs, along 
mule paths, and so forth, one could cross the first 
ridge called the "Terrible Hill," and so reach the 
profound gorge of the river Doubs, and a town 
called St. Ursanne. From St. Ursanne, by following 
a mountain road and then climbing some rocks and 
tracking through a wood, one could get straight 
over the second ridge to Glovelier. From Glo- 
velier a highroad took one through a gap to Under- 
velier and on to a town called Moutier or Munster. 
Then from Munster, the road, still following more 
or less the line to Rome but now somewhat to the 
east of it, went on southward till an abrupt turn in 
it forced one to leave it. Then there was another 
rough climb by a difficult path up over the last ridge, 
called the Weissenstein, and from its high edge and 
summit it was but a straight fall of a mile or two 
on to Soleure. 

So much my map told me, and this mixture of 
roads and paths and rock climbs that I had planned 
out, I exactly followed, so as to march on as directly 
as possible towards Rome, which was my goal. For 
if I had not so planned it, but had followed the 
highroads, I should have been compelled to zig-zag 
enormously for days, since these ridges of the Jura 



io2 THE MAP OK THE TRACK 



Giromagny. 



Porrentruy. 



^MUi 






are but little broken, and 
the roads do not rise 
above the crests, but fol- 
low the parallel valleys, 
taking advantage only 
here and there of the 
rare gaps to pass from 
one to another. 

Here is a sketch of the 
way I went, where my 
track is a white line, and 
the round spots in it are 
the towns and villages 
whose names are written 
at the side. In this sketch 
the plains and low vallevs 
are marked dark, and the 
crests of the mountains 
left white. The shading 
is lighter according to 
the height, and the con- 
tour lines (which are very 
far from accurate) re- 
present, I suppose, about 
a thousand feet between 
each, or perhaps a little 



THE SECLUDED VALLEY 103 

more ; and as for the distance, from the Ballon 
d'Alsace to Soleure might be two long days march 
on a flat road, but over mountains and up rocks 
it was all but three, and even that was very good 
going. My first stage was across the plain of 
Belfort, and I had determined to sleep that night 
in Switzerland. 

I wandered down the mountain. A little secret 
path, one of many, saved me the long windings 
of the road. It followed down the central hollow 
of the great cleft and accompanied the stream. All 
the way for miles the water tumbled in fall after 
fall over a hundred steps of rock, and its noise 
mixed with the freshness of the air, and its splashing 
weighted the overhanging branches of the trees. A 
little rain that fell from time to time through the 
clear morning seemed like a sister to the spray of 
the waterfalls ; and what with all this moisture and 
greenery, and the surrounding silence, all the valley 
was inspired with content. It was a repose to 
descend through its leaves and grasses, and find the 
lovely pastures at the foot of the descent, a narrow 
floor between the hills. Here there were the first 
houses of men ; and, from one, smoke was already 
going up thinly into the morning. The air was 
very pure and cold ; it was made more nourishing 



io 4 THE RETURN TO THE PLAINS 

and human by the presence and noise of the waters, 
by the shining wet grasses and the beaded leaves all 
through that umbrageous valley. The shreds of 
clouds which, high above that calm, ran swiftly in 
the upper air, fed it also with soft rains from time 
to time as fine as dew; and through those clear and 
momentary showers one could see the sunlight. 

When I had enjoyed the descent through this 
place for but a few miles, everything changed. 
The road in front ran straight and bordered — it led 
out and onwards over a great flat, set here and 
there with hillocks. The Vosges ended abruptly. 
Houses came more thickly, and by the ceaseless 
culture of the fields, by the flat slate roofs, the 
whitewashed walls, and the voices, and the glare, I 
knew myself to be once more in France of the 
plains ; and the first town I came to was Giromagny. 

Here, as I heard a bell, I thought I would go up 
and hear Mass ; and I did so, but my attention at 
the holy office was distracted by the enormous 
number of priests that I found in the church, and I 
have wondered painfully ever since how so many 
came to be in a little place like Giromagny. There 
were three priests at the high altar, and nearly one 
for each chapel, and there was such a buzz of Masses 
going on, beginning and ending, that I am sure I 



THE MANY PRIESTS 105 

need not have gone without my breakfast in my 
hurry to get one. With all this there were few 
people at Mass so early ; nothing but these priests 
going in and out, and continual little bells. I am 
still wondering. Giromagny is no place for relics 
or for a pilgrimage, it cures no one, and has nothing 
of a holy look about it, and all these priests 

Lector. Pray dwell less on your religion, 
and 

Auctor. Pray take books as you find them, 
and treat travel as travel. For you, when you go 
to a foreign country, see nothing but what you 
expect to see. But I am astonished at a thousand 
accidents, and always find things twenty-fold as 
great as I supposed they would be, and far more 
curious; the whole covered by a strange light of 
adventure. And that is the peculiar value of this 
book. Now, if you can explain these priests 

Lector. I can. It was the season of the year, 
and they were swarming. 

Auctor. So be it. Then if you will hear 
nothing of what interests me, I see no reason for 
setting down with minute care what interests you, 
and I may leave out all mention of the Girl who 
could only speak German, of the Arrest of the 
Criminal, and even of the House of Marshal Turenne 



106 THE GREAT GARRISONS 

— this last something quite exceptionally enter- 
taining. But do not let us continue thus, nor push 
things to an open quarrel." You must imagine for 
yourself about six miles of road, and then 

— then in the increasing heat, the dust rising in 
spite of the morning rain, and the road most 
wearisome, I heard again the sound of bugles and 
the sombre excitement of the drums. 

It is a thought-provoking thing, this passing from 
one great garrison to another all the way down the 
frontier. I had started from the busy order of 
Toul ; I had passed through the silence and peace 
of all that Moselle country, the valley like a long 
garden, and I had come to the guns and the tramp 
of Epinal. I had left Epinal and counted the miles 
and miles of silence in the forests, I had crossed the 
great hills and come down into quite another plain 
draining to another sea, and I heard again all the 
clamour that goes with soldiery, and looking 
backward then over my four days, one felt — one 
almost saw — the new system of fortification. The 
vast entrenched camps each holding an army, the 
ungarnished gaps between. 

As I came nearer to Bel fort, I saw the guns 
going at a trot down a side road, and, a little later, 



THE STRANGE WINE 107 

I saw marching on my right, a long way off, the 
irregular column, the dust and the invincible gaiety 
of the French line. The sun here and there glinted 
on the ends of rifle barrels and the polished pouches. 
Their heavy pack made their tramp loud and 
thudding. They were singing a song. 

I had already passed the outer forts ; I had noted 
a work close to the road ; I had gone on a mile 
or so and had entered the long and ugly suburb 
where the tramway lines began, when, on one of 
the ramshackle houses of that burning, paved, and 
noisy, endless street, I saw written up the words, 

" Wine ; shut or open" 

As it is a great rule to examine every new thing, 
and to suck honey out of every flower, I did not — 
as some would — think the phrase odd and pass on. 
I stood stock-still gazing at the house and imagin- 
ing a hundred explanations. I had never in my 
life heard wine divided into shut and open wine. ' I 
determined to acquire yet one more great experi- 
ence, and going in I found a great number of tin 
cans, such as the French carry up water in, with- 
out covers, tapering to the top, and standing about 
three feet high ; on these were pasted large printed 
labels, " 30," " 40," and " 50," and they were brim- 



108 EXCELLENCE OE THE WINE 

mi ng with wine. I spoke to the woman, and point- 
ing at the tin cans, said — 

" Is this what you call open wine ? " 

"Why, yes," said she. "Cannot you see for 
yourself that it is open ? " 

That was true enough, and it explained a great 
deal. But it did not explain how — seeing that if 
you leave a bottle of wine uncorked for ten minutes 
you spoil it — you can keep gallons of it in a great 
wide can, for all the world like so much milk, 
milked from the Panthers of the God. I deter- 
mined to test the prodigy yet further, and choosing 
the middle price, at fourpence a quart, I said — 

" Pray give me a hap'orth in a mug." 

This the woman at once did, and when I came to 
drink it, it was delicious. Sweet, cool, strong, lift- 
ing the heart, satisfying, and full of all those things 
wine merchants talk of, bouquet, and body, and 
flavour. It was what I have heard called a very 
pretty wine. 

I did not wait, however, to discuss the marvel, 
but accepted it as one of those mysteries of which 
this pilgrimage was already giving me examples, and 
of which more were to come — (wait till you hear 
about the brigand of Radicofani). I said to myself — 

" When I get out of the Terre Majeure, and 



ON BUILDING BRIDGES 109 

away from the strong and excellent government of 
the Republic, when I am lost in the Jura Hills 
to-morrow there will be no such wine as this." 

So I bought a quart of it, corked it up very 
tight, put it in my sack, and held it in store against 
the wineless places on the flanks of the hill called 
Terrible, where there are no soldiers, and where 
Swiss is the current language. Then I went on 
into the centre of the town. 

As I passed over the old bridge into the market- 
place, where I proposed to lunch, (the sun was 
terrible — it was close upon eleven,) I saw them 
building parallel with that old bridge a new one to 
replace it. And the way they build a bridge in 
Belfort is so wonderfully simple, and yet so new, 
that it is well worth telling. 

In most places when a bridge has to be made, 
there is an infinite pother and worry about building 
the piers, coffer-dams, and heaven knows what else. 
Some swing their bridges to avoid this trouble, and 
some try to throw an arch of one span from side to 
side. There are a thousand different tricks. In 
Belfort they simply wait until the water has run 
away. Then a great brigade of workmen run down 
into the dry bed of the river and dig the founda- 
tions feverishly, and begin building the piers in 



no THE LION OF BELFORT 

great haste. Soon the water comes back, hut the 
piers are already above it, and the rest of the work 
is done from boats. This is absolutely true. Not 
only did I see the men in the bed of the river, 
but a man whom I asked told me that it seemed 
to him the most natural way to build bridges, 
and doubted if they were ever made in any other 
fashion. 

There is also in Belfort a great lion carved in 
rock to commemorate the siege of 1870. This 
lion is part of the precipice under the castle, and 
is of enormous size — how large I do not know, 
but I saw that a man looked quite small by one 
of his paws. The precipice was first smoothed 
like a stone slab or tablet, and then this lion was 
carved into and out of it in high relief by Bar- 
tholdi, the same man that made the statue of 
Liberty in New York Harbour. 

The siege of 1870 has been fixed for history 
in yet another way, and one that shows you how 
the Church works on from one stem continually. 
For there is a little church somewhere near or in 
Belfort (I do not know where, I only heard of it) 
which a local mason and painter being told to deco- 
rate for so much, he amused himself by painting 
all round it little pictures of the siege — of the cold, 



THE SAD ECONOMISTS in 

and the wounds, and the heroism. This is indeed 
the way such things should be done, I mean by 
men doing them for pleasure and of their own 
thought. And I have a number of friends who 
agree with me in thinking this, that art should 
not be competitive or industrial, but most of them 
go on to the very strange conclusion that one 
should not own one's garden, nor one's beehive, 
nor one's great noble house, nor one's pigsry, 
nor one's railway shares, nor the very boots on 
one's feet. I say, out upon such nonsense. Then 
they say to me, what about the concentration of 
the means of production ? And I say to them, 
what about the distribution of the ownership of 
the concentrated means of production ? And they 
shake their heads sadly, and say it would never 
endure ; and I say, try it first and see. Then they 
fly into a rage. 

When I lunched in Belfort (and at lunch, by 
the way, a poor man asked me to use all my in- 
fluence for his son, who was an engineer in the 
navy, and this he did because I had been boast- 
ing of my travels, experiences, and grand acquaint- 
ances throughout the world) — when, I say, I had 
lunched in a workman's cafe at Belfort, I set out 



ii2 THE POWDER-MAGAZINE 

again on my road, and was very much put out 
to find that showers still kept on falling. 

In the early morning, under such delightful 
trees, up in the mountains, the branches had given 
me a roof, the wild surroundings made me part 
of the out-of-doors, and the rain had seemed to 
marry itself to the pastures and the foaming beck. 
But here, on a road and in a town, all its tradi- 
tion of discomfort came upon me. I was angry, 
therefore, with the weather and the road for some 
miles, till two things came to comfort me. First it 
cleared, and a glorious sun showed me from a 
little eminence the plain of Alsace and the moun- 
tains of the Vosges all in line ; secondly, I came 
to a vast powder-magazine. 

To most people there is nothing more subtle 
or pleasing in a powder-magazine than in a re- 
servoir. They are both much the same in the 
mere exterior, for each is a flat platform, sloping 
at the sides and covered with grass, and each has 
mysterious doors. But, for my part, I never see 
a powder-magazine without being filled at once 
with two very good feelings — laughter and com- 
panionship. For it was my good fortune, years and 
years ago, to be companion and friend to two 
men who were on sentry at a powder-magazine just 



THE JOY IN IT 113 

after there had been some anarchist attempts (as 
they call them) upon such depots — and for the 
matter of that I can imagine nothing more luscious 
to the anarchist than seven hundred and forty- 
two cases of powder and fifty cases of melinite all 
stored in one place. And to prevent the enor- 
mous noise, confusion, and waste that would have 
resulted from the over-attraction of this base of 
operations to the anarchists, my two friends, one of 
whom was a duty-doing Burgundian, but the other 
a loose Parisian man, were on sentry that night. 
They had strict orders to challenge once and then 
to fire. 

Now, can you imagine anything more exquisite 
to a poor devil of a conscript, fagged out with 
garrison duty and stale sham-fighting, than an 
order of that kind ? So my friends took it, and 
in one summer night they killed a donkey and 
wounded two mares, and broke the thin stem of a 
growing tree. 

This powder-magazine was no exception to my 
rule, for as I approached it I saw a round-faced 
corporal and two round-faced men looking eagerly 
to see who might be attacking their treasure, and 
I became quite genial in my mind when I thought 
of how proud these boys felt, and of how I was 



ii 4 GREAT PAIN IN THE LEG 

of the "class of ninety, rifled and mounted on 
its carriage" (if you don't see the point of the 
allusion, I can't stop to explain it. It was a good 
gun in its time — now they have the seventy-five 
that doesn't recoil — requiescat), and of how they 
were longing for the night, and a chance to shoot 
anything on the sky line. 

Full of these foolish thoughts, but smiling in 
spite of their folly, I went down the road. 

Shall I detail all that afternoon ? My leg horri- 
fied me with dull pain, and made me fear I should 
never hold out, I do not say to Rome, but even to 
the frontier. I rubbed it from time to time with 
balm, but, as always happens to miraculous things, 
the virtue had gone out of it with the lapse of time. 
At last I found a side road going off from the 
main way, and my map told me it was on the whole 
a short cut to the frontier. I determined to take 
it for those few last miles, because, if one is suffer- 
ing, a winding lane is more tolerable than a wide 
turnpike. 

Just as I came to the branching of the roads I 
saw a cross put up, and at its base the motto that 
is universal to French crosses — 

"Ave Crux Spes Unica.' ,y 



THE LAST OF THE VOSGES 



"5 



I thought it a good opportunity for recollection, 
and sitting down, I looked backward along the 
road I had come. 

There were the high mountains of the Vosges 
standing up above the plain of Alsace like sloping 



«£* 










~V 



lllilllB. 






M\\S1 




cliffs above a sea. I drew them as they stood, and 
wondered if that frontier were really permanent. 
The mind of man is greater than such accidents, 
and can easily overleap even the high hills. 

Then having drawn them, and in that drawing 
said a kind of farewell to the influences that had fol- 
lowed me for so many miles — the solemn quiet, the 



n6 THE PONDS 

steady industry, the self-control, the deep woods, of 
Lorraine — I rose up stiffly from the bank that had 
been my desk, and pushed along the lane that ran 
devious past neglected villages. 

The afternoon and the evening followed as I put 
one mile after another behind me. The frontier 
seemed so close that I would not rest. I left my 
open wine, the wine I had found outside Belfort, 
untasted, and I plodded on and on as the light 
dwindled. I was in a grand wonderment for Switzer- 
land, and I wished by an immediate effort to 
conquer the last miles before night, in spite of 
my pain. Also, I will confess to a silly pride in 
distances, and a desire to be out of France on my 
fourth day. 

The light still fell, and my resolution stood, 
though my exhaustion undermined it. The line of 
the mountains rose higher against the sky, and there 
entered into my pilgrimage for the first time the 
loneliness and the mystery of meres. Something of 
what a man feels in East England belonged to this 
last of the plain under the guardian hills. Every- 
where I passed ponds and reeds, and saw the level 
streaks of sunset reflected in stagnant waters. 

The marshy valley kept its character when I had 
left the lane and regained the highroad. Its isola- 



WHAT IS THE SOUL? 117 

tion dominated the last effort with which I made 
for the line of the Jura in that summer twilight, 
and as I blundered on my whole spirit was caught 
or lifted in the influence of the waste waters and 
of the birds of evening. 

I wished, as I had often wished in such oppor- 
tunities- of recollection and of silence, for a complete 
barrier that might isolate the mind. With that wish 




came in a puzzling thought, very proper to a pilgrim- 
age, which was : " What do men mean by the desire 
to be dissolved and to enjoy the spirit free and with- 
out attachments ? " That many men have so de- 
sired there can be no doubt, and the best men, whose 
holiness one recognises at once, tell us that the joys 
of the soul are incomparably higher than those of 
the living man. In India, moreover, there are great 
numbers of men who do the most fantastic things 
with the object of thus unprisoning the soul, and 
Milton talks of the same thing with evident con- 



n8 WHAT IS IT? 

viction, and the Saints all praise it in chorus. But 
what is it ? For my part I cannot understand so 
much as the meaning of the words, for every 
pleasure I know comes from an intimate union 
between my body and my very human mind, which 
last receives, confirms, revives, and can summon up 
again what my body has experienced. Of pleasures, 
however, in which my senses have had no part I 
know nothing, so I have determined to take them 
upon trust and see whether they could make the 
matter clearer in Rome. 

But when it comes to the immortal mind, the 
good spirit in me that is so cunning at forms and 
colours and the reasons of things, that is a very 
different story. That, I do indeed desire to have to 
myself at whiles, and the waning light of a day or 
the curtains of autumn closing in the year are often 
to me like a door shutting after one, as one comes in 
home. For I find that with less and less impression 
from without the mind seems to take on a power of 
creation, and by some mystery it can project songs 
and landscapes and faces much more desirable than 
the music or the shapes one really hears and sees. 
So also memory can create. But it is not the soul 
that does this, for the songs, the landscapes, and the 
faces are of a kind that have come in by the senses, 



DISASTER OF THE WINE 119 

nor have I ever understood what could be higher 
than these pleasures, nor indeed how in anything 
formless and immaterial there could be pleasure at all. 
Yet the wisest people assure us that our souls are as 
superior to our minds as are our minds to our inert 
and merely material bodies. I cannot understand 
it at all7 

As I was pondering on these things in this land of 
pastures and lonely ponds, with the wall of the Jura 
black against the narrow bars of evening — (my pain 
seemed gone for a moment, yet I was hobbling 
slowly) — I say, as I was considering this complex 
doctrine, I felt my sack suddenly much lighter, and 
I had hardly time to rejoice at the miracle when I 
heard immediately a very loud crash, and turning 
half round I saw on the blurred white of the twilit 
road my quart of Open Wine all broken to atoms. 
My disappointment was so great that I sat down on 
a milestone to consider the accident and to see if a 
little thought would not lighten my acute annoyance. 
Consider that I had carefully cherished this bottle 
and had not drunk throughout a painful march all 
that afternoon, thinking that there would be no 
wine worth drinking after I had passed the frontier. 

I consoled myself more or less by thinking about 
torments and evils to which even such a loss as this 



120 ENTRY INTO SWITZERLAND 

was nothing, and then I rose to go on into the night. 
As it turned out I was to find beyond the frontier a 
wine in whose presence this wasted wine would have 
seemed a wretched jest, and whose wonderful taste 
was to colour all my memories of the Mount 
Terrible. It is always thus with sorrows if one will 
only wait. 

So, lighter in the sack but heavier in the heart, I 
went forward to cross the frontier in the dark. I 
did not quite know where the point came : I only 
knew that it was about a mile from Delle, the last 
French town. I supped there and held on my way. 
When I guessed that I had covered this mile I saw 
a light in the windows on my left, a trellis and the 
marble tables of a cafe. I put my head in at the 
door and said — 

" Am I in Switzerland ? " 

A German-looking girl, a large heavy man, a 
Bavarian commercial traveller, and a colleague of 
his from Marseilles all said together in varying 
accents : " Yes." 

" Why then," I said, " I will come in and drink." 

This book would never end if I were to attempt 
to write down so much as the names of a quarter 
of the extraordinary things that I saw and heard 



THE PHOCEAN 121 

on my enchanted pilgrimage, but let me at least 
mention the Commercial Traveller from Marseilles. 

He talked with extreme rapidity for two hours. 
He had seen all the cities in the world and he 
remembered their minutest details. He was ex- 
tremely accurate, his taste was abominable, his 
patriotism large, his vitality marvellous, his wit 
crude but continual, and to his German friend, to 
the host of the inn, and to the blonde serving-girl, 
he was a familiar god. He came, it seems, once 
a year, and for a day would pour out the torrent 
of his travels like a waterfall of guide-books (for 
he gloried in dates, dimensions, and the points 
of the compass in his descriptions), then he dis- 
appeared for another year, and left them to feast on 
the memory of such a revelation. 

For my part, I sat silent, crippled with fatigue, 
trying to forget my wounded feet, drinking stoup 
after stoup of beer and watching the Phocean. He 
was of the old race you see on vases in red and 
black. Slight, very wiry, with a sharp, eager, but 
well-set face, a small, black, pointed beard, brilliant 
eyes like those of lizards, rapid gestures and a 
vivacity that played all over his features as sheet 
lightning does over the glow of midnight in June. 

That delta of the Rhone is something quite 



122 THE PHOCEAN 

separate from the rest of France. It is a wedge 
of Greece and of the East thrust into the Gauls. 
It came north a hundred years ago and killed the 
monarchy. It caught the value in, and created, 
the great war song of the Republic. 

I watched the Phocean. I thought of a man of 
his ancestry three thousand years ago sitting here 
at the gates of these mountains talking of his 
travels to dull, patient, and admiring northerners, 
and travelling for gain up on into the Germanies, 
and I felt the changeless form of Europe under 
me like a rock. 

When he heard I was walking to Rome, this 
man of information turned off his flood into an- 
other channel, as a miller will send the racing water 
into a side sluice, and he poured out some such tor- 
rent as this : — 

" Do not omit to notice the famous view SE. 
from the Villa So and So on Monte Mario ; visit 
such and such a garden, and hear Mass in such and 
such a church. Note the curious illusion produced 
on the piazza of St. Peter's by the interior measure- 
ments of the trapezium, which are so many yards 
and so many yards, . . ." &c, and so forth . . . 
exactly like a mill. 

I meanwhile sat on still silent, still drinking beer 



THE NEW COUNTRY 123 

and watching the Phocean ; gradually suffering the 
fascination that had captured the villagers and the 
German friend. He was a very wonderful man. 

He was also kindly, for I found afterwards that 
he had arranged with the host to give me up his 
bed, seeing my weariness. For this, most unluckily, 
I was never able to thank him, since the next 
morning I was off before he or any one else was 
awake, and I left on the table such money as I 
thought would very likely satisfy the innkeeper. 

It was broad day, but not yet sunrise (there were 
watery thin clouds left here and there from the day 
before, a cold wind drove them) when, with extreme 
pain, going slowly one step after the other and 
resting continually, I started for Porrentruy along 
a winding road, and pierced the gap in the Jura. 
The first turn cut me off from France, and I was 
fairly in a strange country. 

The valley through which I was now passing 
resembled that of the lovely river Jed where it runs 
down from the Cheviots, and leads like a road into 
the secret pastures of the lowlands. Here also, as 
there, steep cliffs of limestone bounded a very 
level dale, all green grass and plenty ; the plateau 
above them was covered also with perpetual woods, 



i2 4 AGE IN ALL THINGS 

only here, different from Scotland, the woods ran 
on and upwards till they became the slopes of high 
mountains; indeed, this winding cleft was a natural 
passage through the first ridge of the Jura ; the 
second stood up southward before me like a deep 
blue storm. 

I had, as I passed on along this turning-way, 
all the pleasures of novelty ; it was quite another 
country from the governed and ordered France 
which I had left. The road was more haphazard, 
less carefully tended, and evidently less used. The 
milestones were very old, and marked leagues in- 
stead of kilometres. There was age in everything. 
Moss grew along the walls, and it was very quiet 
under the high trees. I did not know the name 
of the little river that went slowly through the 
meadows, nor whether it followed the custom of 
its French neighbours on the watershed, and was 
called by some such epithet as hangs to all the 
waters in that gap of Belfort, that plain of ponds 
and marshes : for they are called " the Sluggish," 
" the Muddy," or " the Laggard." Even the name 
of the Saone, far off, meant once " Slow Water." 

I was wondering what its name might be, and 
how far I stood from Porrentruy (which I knew 
to be close by), when I saw a tunnel across the 



DE GERMANIA 125 

valley, and I guessed by the trend of the higher hills 
that the river was about to make a very sharp 
angle. Both these signs, I had been told, meant 
that I was quite close to the town ; so I took 
a short cufup through the forest over a spur of 
hill — a short cut most legitimate, because it was 
trodden and very manifestly used — and I walked 
up and then on a level for a mile, along a lane 
of the woods and beneath small, dripping trees. 
When this short silence of the forest was over, I 
saw an excellent sight. 

There, below me, where the lane began to fall, 
was the first of the German cities. 

Lector. How " German " ? 

Auctor. Let me explain. There is a race 
that stretches vaguely, without defined boundaries, 
from the Baltic into the high hills of the south. 
I will not include the Scandinavians among them, 
for the Scandinavians (from whom we English also 
in part descend) are long-headed, lean, and fierce, 
with a light of adventure in their pale eyes. But 
beneath them, I say, there stretches from the Baltic 
to the high hills a race which has a curious unity. 
Yes; I know that great patches of it are Catholic, 
and that other great patches hold varying philo- 
sophies; I know also that within them are counted 



126 THE GERMAN PEOPLE 

long-headed and round-headed men, dark, and fair, 
violent and silent; I know also that they have 
continually fought among themselves and called 
in Welch allies ; still I go somewhat by the lan- 
guage, for I am concerned here with the develop- 
ment of a modern European people, and I say 
that the Germans run from the high hills to the 
northern sea. In all of them you find (it is not 
race, it is something much more than race, it is 
the type of culture) a dreaminess and a love of 
ease. In all of them you find music. They are 
those Germans whose countries I had seen a long 
way off, from the Ballon d' Alsace, and whose lan- 
guage and traditions I now first touched in the 
town that stood before me. 

Lector. But in Porrentruy they talk French! 

Auctor. They are welcome ; it is an excellent 
tongue. Nevertheless, they are Germans. Who 
but Germans would so preserve — would so rebuild 
the past ? Who but Germans would so feel the 
mystery of the hills, and so fit their town to the 
mountains? 1 was to pass through but a narrow 
wedge of this strange and diffuse people. They 
began at Porrentruy, they ended at the watershed 
of the Adriatic, in the high passes of the Alps ; 
but in that little space of four days I made ac- 



THE ENORMOUS TOWER 127 

quaintance with their influence, and I owe them a 
perpetual gratitude for their architecture and their 
tales. I had come from France, which is full of 
an active memory of Rome. I was to debouch 
into those larger plains of Italy, which keep about 
them an atmosphere of Rome in decay. Here in 
Switzerland, for four marches, I touched a northern, 
exterior and barbaric people ; for though these 
mountains spoke a distorted Latin tongue, and 
only after the first day began to give me a teutonic 
dialect, yet it was evident from the first that they 
had about them neither the Latin order nor the 
Latin power to create, but were contemplative and 
easily absorbed by a little effort. 

The German spirit is a marvel. There lay Por- 
rentruy. An odd door with Gothic turrets marked 
the entry to the town. To the right of this gate- 
way a tower, more enormous than anything I re- 
membered to have seen, even in dreams, flanked the 
approach to the city. How vast it was, how pro- 
tected, how high, how eaved, how enduring ! I 
was told later that some part of that great bastion 
was Roman, and I can believe it. The Germans 
hate to destroy. It overwhelmed me as visions 
overwhelm, and I felt in its presence as boys feel 
when they first see the mountains. Had I not been 



128 WINE OF THE HILLS 

a Christian, I would have worshipped and propitiated 
this obsession, this everlasting thing. 

As it was I entered Porrentruy soberly. 1 passed 
under its deep gateway and up its steep hill. The 
moment I was well into the main street, something 
other of the Middle Ages possessed me, and I 
began to think of food and wine. I went to the 
very first small guest-house I could find, and asked 
them if they could serve me food. They said that 
at such an early hour (it was not yet ten) they 
could give me nothing but bread, yesterday's meat, 
and wine. I said that would do very well, and all 
these things were set before me, and by a custom 
of the country I paid before I ate. (A bad 
custom. Up in the Limousin, when I was a boy, 
in the noisy valley of the Torrent, on the Vienne, 
I remember a woman that did not allow me to pay 
till she had held the bottle up to the light, measured 
the veal with her finger, and estimated the bread 
with her eye; also she charged me double. God 
rest her soul ! ) I say I paid. And had I had to 
pay twenty or twenty-three times as much it would 
have been worth it for the wine. 

I am hurrying on to Rome, and I have no time 
to write a georgic. But, oh ! my little friends of 
the north ; my struggling, strenuous, introspective, 



THE ASTOUNDING WINE 129 

self-analysing, autoscopic, and generally reentrant 
friends, who spout the "Hue! Pater, oh ! Lenae ! " 
without a ghost of an idea what you are talking 
about, do you know what is meant by the god ? 
Bacchus is everywhere, but if he has special sites to 
be ringed in and kept sacred, I say let these be 
Brule, and the silent vineyard that lies under the 
square wood by Tournus, the hollow underplace of 
Heltz le Maurupt, and this town of Porrentruy. 
In these places if I can get no living friends to 
help me, I will strike the foot alone on the genial 
ground, and I know of fifty maenads and two 
hundred little attendant gods by name that will 
come to the festival. 

What a wine ! 

I was assured it would not travel. " Neverthe- 
less," said I, "give me a good quart bottle of it, 
for I have to go far, and I see there is a providence 
for pilgrims." 

So they charged me fourpence, and I took my 
bottle of this wonderful stuff, sweet, strong, suffi- 
cient, part of the earth, desirable, and went up on 
my way to Rome. 

Could this book be infinite, as my voyage was in- 
finite, I would tell you about the shifty priest whom 

9 



130 THE ERRONEOUS ANARCHIST 

I met on the platform of the church where a cliff 
overhangs the valley, and of the Anarchist whom I 
met when I recovered the highroad — he was a sad, 
good man, who had committed some sudden crime 
and so had left France, and his hankering for France 
all those years had soured his temper, and he said he 
wished there were no property, no armies, and no 
governments. 

But I said that we live as parts of a nation, 
and that there was no fate so wretched as to be 
without a country of one's own — what else was 
exile which so many noble men have thought worse 
than death, and which all have feared? I also told 
him that armies fighting in a just cause were the 
happiest places for living, and that a good battle 
for justice was the beginning of all great songs ; and 
that as for property, a man on his own land was the 
nearest to God. 

He therefore not convinced, and I loving and 
pitying him, we separated ; I had no time to 
preach my full doctrine, but gave him instead a 
deep and misty glass of cool beer, and pledged 
him brotherhood, freedom, and an equal law. Then 
I went on my way, praying God that all these 
rending quarrels might be appeased. For they 
would certainly be appeased if we once again had a 



THE ECONOMIC SCIENCE 131 

united doctrine in Europe, since economics are but 
an expression of the mind and do not (as the poor 
blind slaves of the great cities think) mould the 
mind. What is more, nothing makes property run 
into a few hands but the worst of the capital sins, and 
you who say it is " the modern facility of distribu- 
tion " are like men who cannot read large print 
without spectacles ; or again, you are like men who 
should say that their drunkenness was due to their 
drink, or that arson was caused by matches. 

But, frankly, do you suppose I came all this way 
over so many hills to talk economics ? Very far 
from it ! I will pray for all poor men when I get 
to St. Peter's in Rome (I should like to know what 
capital St. Peter had in that highly capitalistic first 
century), and, meanwhile, do you discuss the mar- 
gin of production while I go on the open way ; 
there are no landlords here, and if you would learn 
at least one foreign language, and travel but five 
miles off a railway, you town-talkers, you would 
find how much landlordism has to do with your 
" necessities " and your " laws." 

Lector. I thought you said you were not going 
to talk economics. 

Auctor. Neither am I. It is but the back 
wash of a wave. . . . Well, then, I went up the 



132 THE MOUNT TERRIBLE 

open way, and came in a few miles of that hot after- 
noon to the second ridge of the Jura, which they 
call "the Terrible Hill," or " the Mount Terrible" 
— and, in truth, it is very jagged. A steep, long 
crest of very many miles lies here between the vale 
of Porrentruy and the deep gorge of the Doubs. 
The highroad goes off a long way westward, seek- 
ing for a pass or neck, in the chain, but I determined 
to find a straight road across, and spoke to some 
wood-cutters who were felling trees just where the 
road began to climb. They gave me this curious 
indication. They said — 

" Go you up this muddy track that has been made 
athwart the woods and over the pastures by our 
sliding logs " (for they had cut their trunks higher 
up the mountains), " and you will come to the sum- 
mit easily. From thence you will see the Doubs 
running below you in a very deep and dark ravine." 

I thanked them, and soon found that they had 
told me right. There, unmistakable, a gash in the 
forest and across the intervening fields of grass was 
the run of the timber. 

When I had climbed almost to the top, I looked 
behind me to take my last view of the north. I 
saw just before me a high isolated rock ; between me 
and it was the forest. I saw beyond it the infinite 



THE MOUNT TERRIBLE 



133 



plain of Alsace and the distant Vosges. The cliff 
of limestone that bounded that height fell sheer 
upon the tree-tops ; its sublimity arrested me, and 
compelled me to record it. 

" Surely," I said, " if Switzerland has any gates 
on the north they are these." 







Then, having drawn the wonderful outline of 
what I had seen, I went up, panting, to the sum- 
mit, and, resting there, discovered beneath me the 
curious swirl of the Doubs, where it ran in a dark 
gulf thousands of feet below. The shape of this 
extraordinary turn I will describe in a moment. 
Let me say, meanwhile, that there was no precipice or 



134 THE KNITTING WOMAN 

rock between me and the river, only a down, down, 
down through other trees and pastures, not too 
steep for a man to walk, but steeper than our steep 
downs and fells in England, where a man hesitates 
and picks his way. It was so much of a descent, 
and so long, that one looked above the tree-tops. 
It was a place where no one would care to ride. 

I found a kind of path, sideways on the face 
of the mountain, and followed it till I came to 
a platform with a hut perched thereon, and men 
building. Here a good woman told me just how 
to go. I was not to attempt the road to Brune- 
Farine — that is, "Whole-Meal Farm " — as I had 
first intended, foolishly trusting a map, but to take 
a gully she would show me, and follow it till I 
reached the river. She came out, and led me 
steeply across a hanging pasture ; all the while she 
had knitting in her hands, and I noticed that on the 
levels she went on with her knitting. Then, when 
we got to the gully, she said I had but to follow it. 
I thanked her, and she climbed up to her home. 

This gully was the precipitous bed of a stream ; 
I clanked down it — thousands of feet — warily; I 
reached the valley, and at last, very gladly, came 
to a drain, and thus knew that I approached a 
town or village. It was St. Ursanne. 



THE BENT WINDOWS 



*3S 




The very first thing I noticed in St. Ursanne 
was the extraordinary shape of the lower windows 
of the church. They lighted a crypt and ran 
along the ground, which in itself was sufficiently 
remarkable, but much more remarkable was their 
shape, which seemed to me 
to approach that of a horse- 
shoe ; I never saw such a 
thing before. It looked as 
though the weight of the 
church above had bulged 
these little windows out, and 
that is the way I explain it. Some people would 
say it was a man coming home from the Crusades 
that had made them this eastern way, others that 
it was a symbol of something or other. But I 
say 

Lector. What rhodomontade and pedantry is 
this talk about the shape of a window? 

Auctor. Little friend, how little you know ! 
To a building windows are everything ; they are 
what eyes are to a man. Out of windows a build- 
ing takes its view ; in windows the outlook of its 
human inhabitants is framed. If you were the lord 
of a very high tower overlooking a town, a plain, 
a river, and a distant hill (I doubt if you will ever 



J 3 6 



PRAISE OF WINDOWS 



have such luck !), would you not call your architect 
up before you and say — 

" Sir, see that the windows of 
my house are tally narrow, thick, 
and have a round top to them " ? 

Of course you would, for thus 
you would best catch in separate 
pictures the sunlit things outside 
your home. 

Never ridicule windows. It is 
out of windows that many fall to 
their death. By windows love often 
enters. Through a window went 
the bolt that killed King Richard. 
King William's father spied Arlette 
from a window (I have looked 
through it myself, but not a soul did I see washing 
below). When a mob would rule England, it 
breaks windows, and when a patriot would save her, 
he taxes them. Out of windows we walk on to 
lawns in summer and meet men and women, and 
in winter windows are drums for the splendid 
music of storms that makes us feel so masterly 
round our fires. The windows of the great cathe- 
drals are all their meaning. But for windows we 
should have to go out-of-doors to see daylight. 




THE BEAR-SAINT 137 

After the sun, which they serve, I know of nothing 
so beneficent as windows. Fie upon the ungrateful 
man that has no window-god in his house, and 
thinks himself too great a philosopher to bow down 
to windows! May he live in a place without 
windows for a while to teach him the value of 
windows. As for me, I will keep up the high 
worship of windows till I come to the windowless 
grave. Talk to me of windows ! 

Yes. There are other things in St. Ursanne. It 
is a little tiny town, and yet has gates. It is full of 
very old houses, people, and speech. It was 
founded (or named) by a Bear Saint, and the statue 
of the saint with his bear is carved on the top of a 
column in the market-place. But the chief thing 
about it, so it seemed to me, was its remoteness. 

The Gorge of the Doubs, of which I said a word 
or two above, is of that very rare shape which 
isolates whatever may be found in such valleys. It 
turns right back upon itself, like a very narrow U, 
and thus cannot by any possibility lead any one 
anywhere ; for though in all times travellers have 
had to follow river valleys, yet when they come to 
such a long and sharp turn as this, they have always 
cut across the intervening bend. 



138 



GORGE OF THE DOUBS 



Here is the shape of this valley with the high 
hills round it and in its core, which will show better 




than description what I mean. The little picture 
also shows what the gorge looked like as I came 
down on it from the heights above. 



THE TEMPTING BRIDGE 139 

In the map the small white " A " shows where 
the railway bridge was, and in this map as in the 
others the dark is for the depth and the light is for 
the heights. As for the picture it is what one sees 
when one is coming over the ridge at the north or 
top of the map, and when one first catches the river 
beneath one. 

I thought a good deal about what the Romans 
did to get through the Mont Terrible, and how 
they negotiated this crook in the Doubs (for they 
certainly passed into Gaul through the gates of 
Porrentruy, and by that obvious valley below it). I 
decided that they probably came round eastward by 
Delemont. But, for my part, I was on a straight 
path to Rome, and as that line lay just along the 
top of the river bend I was bound to take it. 

Now outside St. Ursanne, if one would go along 
the top of the river bend and so up to the other 
side of the gorge, is a kind of subsidiary ravine — 
awful, deep, and narrow — and this was crossed, I 
could see, by a very high railway bridge. 

Not suspecting any evil, and desiring to avoid 
the long descent into the ravine, the looking for a 
bridge or ford, and the steep climb up the other side, 
I made in my folly for the station which stood just 
where the railway left solid ground to go over this 



i 4 o ON TERROR 

high, high bridge. I asked leave of the station- 
master to cross it, who said it was strictly forbidden, 
but that he was not a policeman, and that I might 
do it at my own risk. Thanking him, therefore, 
and considering how charming was the loose habit 
of small uncentralised societies, I went merrily on 
to the bridge, meaning to walk across it by stepping 
from sleeper to sleeper. But it was not to be so 
simple. The powers of the air, that hate to have 
their kingdom disturbed, watched me as I began. 

I had not been engaged upon it a dozen yards 
when I was seized with terror. 

I have much to say further on in this book 
concerning terror : the panic that haunts high places 
and the spell of many angry men. This horrible 
affection of the mind is the delight of our modern 
scribblers ; it is half the plot of their insane " short 
stories," and is at the root of their worship of 
what they call "strength," a cowardly craving for 
protection, or the much more despicable fascination 
of brutality. For my part I have always disregarded 
it as something impure and devilish, unworthy of 
a Christian. Fear I think, indeed, to be in the 
nature of things, and it is as much part of my 
experience to be afraid of the sea or of an un- 
tried horse as it is to eat and sleep ; but terror, 



THE DREADFUL BRIDGE 141 

which is a sudden madness and paralysis of the soul, 
that I say is from hell, and not to be played with 
or considered or put in pictures or described in 
stories. All this I say to preface what happened, 
and especially to point out how terror is in the 
nature of a possession and is unreasonable. 

For in the crossing of this bridge there was 
nothing in itself perilous. The sleepers lay very 
close together — I doubt if a man could have 
slipped between them ; but, I know not how many 
hundred feet below, was the flashing of the torrent, 
and it turned my brain. For the only parapet 
there was a light line or pipe, quite slender and 
low down, running from one spare iron upright to 
another. These rather emphasised than encouraged 
my mood. And still as I resolutely put one foot 
in front of the other, and resolutely kept my eyes 
off the abyss and fixed on the opposing hill, and as 
the long curve before me was diminished by suc- 
cessive sharp advances, still my heart was caught 
half-way in every breath, and whatever it is that 
moves a man went uncertainly within me mechanical 
and half-paralysed. The great height with that 
narrow unprotected ribbon across it was more than 
I could bear. 

I dared not turn round and I dared not stop. 



i 4 2 VOW OF A CANDLE 

Words and phrases began repeating themselves in 
my head as they will under a strain : so I know 
at sea a man perilously hanging on to the tiller 
makes a kind of litany of his instructions. The 
central part was passed, the three-quarters ; the 
tension of that enduring effort had grown intoler- 
able, and I doubted my ability to complete the 
task. Why? What could prevent me? I cannot 
say ; it was all a bundle of imaginaries. Perhaps 
at bottom what I feared was sudden giddiness and 
the fall . 

At any rate at this last supreme part I vowed one 
candle to Our Lady of Perpetual Succour if she would 
see that all went well, and this candle I later paid 
in Rome ; finding Our Lady of Succour not hung 
up in a public place and known to all, as I thought 
She would be, but peculiar to a little church belong- 
ing to a Scotchman and standing above his high altar. 
Yet it is a very famous picture, and extremely old. 

Well, then, having made this vow I still went 
on, with panic aiding me, till I saw that the bank 
beneath had risen to within a few feet of the bridge, 
and that dry land was not twenty yards away. 
Then my resolution left me and I ran, or rather 
stumbled, rapidly from sleeper to sleeper till I could 
take a deep breath on the solid earth beyond. 



SAFETY BEYOND 



H3 



I stood and gazed back over the abyss ; I saw 
the little horrible strip between heaven and hell — 
the perspective of its rails. 
I was made ill by the re- 
lief from terror. Yet I 
suppose railway-men cross 
and recross it twenty times 
a day. Better for them 
than for me ! 

There is the story of 
the awful bridge of the 
Mont Terrible, and it lies to a yard upon the 
straight line — quid dicam — the segment of the Great 
Circle uniting Toul and Rome. 







The high bank or hillside before me was that 
which ends the gorge of the Doubs and looks down 
either limb of the sharp bend. I had here not 
to climb but to follow at one height round the 
curve. My way ran by a rather ill-made lane and 
passed a village. Then it was my business to make 
straight up the farther wall of the gorge, and as 
there was wood upon this, it looked an easy matter. 

But when I came to it, it was not easy. The 
wood grew in loose rocks and the slope was much 
too steep for anything but hands and knees, and far 



t 44 THE WATERSHED 

too soft and broken for true climbing. And no 
wonder this ridge seemed a wall for steepness and 
difficulty, since it was the watershed between the 
Mediterranean and the cold North Sea. But I did 
not know this at the time. It must have taken 
me close on an hour before I had covered the last 
thousand feet or so that brought me to the top 
of the ridge, and there, to my great astonishment, 
was a road. Where could such a road lead, and 
why did it follow right along the highest edge of 
the mountains ? The Jura with their unique paral- 
lels provide twenty such problems. 

Wherever it led, however, this road was plainly 
perpendicular to my true route and I had but to 
press on my straight line. So I crossed it, saw 
for a last time through the trees the gorge of the 
Doubs, and then got upon a path which led down 
through a field more or less in the direction of 
my pilgrimage. 

Here the country was so broken that one 
could make out but little of its general features, 
but of course, on the whole, I was following down 
yet another southern slope, the southern slope of 
the third chain of the Jura, when, after passing 
through many glades and along a stony path, I found 
a kind of gate between two high rocks and emerged 



THE COMMON FIELD 



H5 



somewhat suddenly upon a wide down studded with 
old trees and also many stunted yews, and this 
sank down to a noble valley which lay all before 
me. 

The open down or prairie on which I stood I 
afterwards found to be called the " Pasturage of 
Common Right," a very fine name ; and, as a 




gallery will command a great hall, so this field like 
a platform commanded the wide and fading valley 
below. 

It was a very glad surprise to see this sight sud- 
denly unrolled as I stood on the crest of the down. 
The Jura had hitherto been either lonely, or some- 
what awful, or naked and rocky, but here was a 
true vale in which one could imagine a spirit of 
its own ; there were corn lands and no rocks. 
The mountains on either side did not rise so 
high as three thousand feet. Though of lime- 



146 THE HUMAN TIDE 

stone they were rounded in form, and the slantine; 
sun of the late afternoon (all the storm had left 
the sky) took them full and warm. The valley 
remaining wide and fruitful went on out eastward 
till the hills became mixed up with brume and 
distance. As I did not know its name I called it 
after the village immediately below me for which I 
was making; and I still remember it as the Valley 
of Glovelier, and it lies between the third and fourth 
ridges of the Jura. 

Before leaving the field I drew what I saw, 
but I was much too tired by the double and pro- 
digious climb of the past hours to draw definitely 
or clearly. Such as it is, there it is. Then 1 went 
down over the smooth field. 

There is something that distinguishes the rugged 
from the gracious in landscape, and in our Europe 
this something corresponds to the use and presence 
of men, especially in mountainous places. For 
men's habits and civilisation fill the valleys and 
wash up the base of the hills, making, as it 
were, a tide mark. Into this zone I had already 
passed. The turf was trodden fine, and was set 
firm as it can only become by thousands of years 
of pasturing. The moisture that oozed out of 
the earth was not the random bog of the high 



ON BENEDICTIONS 147 

places but a human spring, caught in a stone 
trough. Attention had been given to the trees. 
Below me stood a wall, which, though rough, was 
not the haphazard thing men pile up in the last 
recesses of the hills, but formed of chosen stones, 
and these bound together with mortar. On my 
right was a deep little dale with children playing 
in it — and this I afterwards learned was called 
a " combe " : delightful memory ! All our deeper 
hollows are called the same at home, and even the 
Welsh have the word, but they spell it cwm ; it is 
their mountain way. Well, as I was saying, every- 
thing surrounding me was domestic and grateful, 
and I was therefore in a mood for charity and 
companionship when I came down the last dip and 
entered Glovelier. But Glovelier is a place of no 
excellence whatever, and if the thought did not 
seem extravagant I should be for putting it to the 
sword and burning it all down. 

For just as I was going along full of kindly 
thoughts, and had turned into the sign of (I think 
it was) the " Sun " to drink wine and leave them 
my benediction 

Lector. Why your benediction ? 

Auctor. Who else can give benedictions if people 
cannot when they are on pilgrimage ? Learn that 



148 THEORY OF BLESSINGS 

there are three avenues by which blessing can be be- 
stowed, and three kinds of men who can bestow it. 

(i) There is the good man, whose goodness 
makes him of himself a giver of blessings. His 
power is not conferred or of office, but is inhaerens 
■persona; part of the stuff of his mind. This kind 
can confer the solemn benediction, or Benedictio 
major, if they choose ; but besides this their every 
kind thought, word, or action is a Benedictio gener alls ; 
and even their frowns, curses, angry looks and 
irritable gestures may be called Benedictiones minores 
vel incerti. I believe I am within the definitions. 
I avoid heresy. All this is sound theology. I do 
not smell of the faggot. And this kind of Bene- 
dictory Power is the fount or type or natural origin, 
as it were, of all others. 

(2) There is the Official of Religion who, in the 
exercise of his office 

Lector. For Heaven's sake 



Auctor. Who began it? You protested my 
power to give benediction, and I must now prove it 
at length ; otherwise I should fall under the accu- 
sation of lesser Simony — that is, the false assump- 
tion of particular powers. Well, then, there is 
the Official who ex officio, and when he makes it 
quite clear that it is qua sponsus and not sicut ut 



THEORY OF BLESSINGS 149 

ipse, can give formal benediction. This power 
belongs certainly to all Bishops, mitred Abbots, and 
Archimandrates ; to Patriarchs of course and a for- 
tiori to the Pope. In Rome they will have it 
that Monsignores also can so bless, and I have 
heard it debated whether or no the same were not 
true in some rustic way of parish priests. How- 
ever this may be, all their power proceeds, not from 
themselves, but from the accumulation of goodness 
left as a deposit by the multitudes of exceptionally 
good men who have lived in times past, and who 
have now no use for it. 

(3) Thirdly — and this is my point — any one, 
good or bad, official or non-official, who is for the 
moment engaged in an opus faustum can act certainly 
as a conductor or medium, and the influence of what 
he is touching or doing passes to you from him. 
This is admitted by every one who worships trees, 
wells, and stones ; and indeed it stands to reason, for 
it is but a branch of the well-known " Sanctificatio ex 
loco, opere, tactu vel conditioned I will admit that this 
power is but vague, slight, tenuous, and dissipatory, 
still there it is: though of course its poor effect is to 
that of the Benedictio major what a cat's-paw in the 
Solent is to a north-east snorter on Lindsey Deeps. 

I am sorry to have been at such length, but it 



150 THE RUDE PEASANTS 

is necessary to have these things thrashed out once 
for all. So now you see how I, being on pilgrimage, 
could give a kind of little creeping blessing to the 
people on the way, though, as St. Louis said to the 
Hascisch-eaters, " may it be a long time before you can 
kiss my bones." 

So I entered the " Sun " inn and saw there a 
woman sewing, a great dull-faced man like an ox, 
and a youth writing down figures in a little book. 
I said — 

" Good morning, madam, and sirs, and the 
company. Could you give me a little red wine ? " 

Not a head moved. 

True I was very dirty and tired, and they may 
have thought me a beggar, to whom, like good 
sensible Christians who had no nonsense about them, 
they would rather have given a handsome kick than 
a cup of cold water. However, I think it was not 
only my poverty but a native churlishness which 
bound their bovine souls in that valley. 

I sat down at a very clean table. I notice that 
those whom the devil has made his own are always 
spick and span, just as firemen who have to go into 
great furnaces have to keep all their gear highly 
polished. I sat down at it, and said again, still 
gently — 



THE OX-MAN 151 

" It is, indeed, a fine country this of yours. 
Could you give me a little red wine ? " 

Then the ox-faced man who had his back turned 
to me, and was the worst of the lot, said sulkily, not 
to me, but to the woman — 

" He wants wine." 

The woman as sulkily said to me, not looking 
me in the eyes — 

" How much will you pay ? " 

I said, " Bring the wine. Set it here. See me 
drink it. Charge me your due." 

I found that this brutal way of speaking was 
just what was needed for the kine and cattle of this 
pen. She skipped off to a cupboard and set wine 
before me, and a glass. I drank quite quietly till I 
had had enough, and asked what there was to pay. 
She said " threepence," and I said " too much," as I 
paid it. At this the ox-faced man grunted and 
frowned, and I was afraid; but hiding my fear I 
walked out boldly and slowly, and made a noise 
with my stick upon the floor of the hall without. 
Neither did I bid them farewell. But I made a 
sign at the house as I left it. Whether it suffered 
from this as did the house at Dorchester which the 
man in the boat caused to wither in one night, is 
more than I can tell. 



I 5 2 



THE GORGE 



The road led straight across the valley and 
approached the further wall of hills. These I saw 
were pierced by one of the curious gaps which are 
peculiar to limestone ranges. Water cuts them, and 
a torrent ran through this one also. The road 

through it, gap though 
it was, went up steeply, 
and the further valley 
was evidently higher than 
the one I was leaving. 
It was already evening 
as I entered this nar- 
row ravine ; the sun only 
caught the tops of the 
rock-walls. My fatigue 
was very great, and my 
walking painful to an 
extreme when, having 
come to a place where 
the gorge was narrowest 
"^ '■;■■ '\' and where the two sides 

""■ -'^jl'- 1 —^- — -"* were like the posts of a 

giant's stile, where also the fifth ridge of the Jura 
stood up beyond me in the further valley, a vast 
shadow, I sat down wearilv and drew what not even 
my exhaustion could render unremarkable. 




ON VOWS 153 

While I was occupied sketching the slabs of 
limestone, I heard wheels coming up behind me, 
and a boy in a waggon stopped and hailed me. 

What the boy wanted to know was whether I 
would take a lift, and this he said in such curious 
French that I shuddered to think how far I had 
pierced into the heart of the hills, and how soon I 
might come to quite strange people. I was greatly 
tempted to get into his cart, but though I had 
broken so many of my vows one remained yet 
whole and sound, which was that I would ride 
upon no wheeled thing. Remembering this, there- 
fore, and considering that the Faith is rich in 
interpretation, I clung on to the waggon in such a 
manner that it did all my work for me, and yet 
could not be said to be actually carrying me. Dis- 
tinguo. The essence of a vow is its literal meaning. 
The spirit and intention are for the major morality, 
and concern Natural Religion, but when upon a 
point of ritual or of dedication or special worship 
a man talks to you of the Spirit and Intention, 
and complains of the dryness of the Word, look 
at him askance. He is not far removed from 
Heresy. 

I knew a man once that was given to drinking, 
and I made up this rule for him to distinguish 



i 5 4 THE LITERAL VOW 

between Bacchus and the Devil. To wit : that he 
should never drink what has been made and sold 
since the Reformation — I mean especially spirits and 
champagne. Let him (said I) drink red wine and 
white, good beer and mead — if he could get it — 
liqueurs made by monks, and, in a word, all those 
feeding, fortifying and confirming beverages that 
our fathers drank in old time; but not whisky, nor 
brandy, nor sparkling wines, nor absinthe, nor the 
kind of drink called gin. This he promised to do, 
and all went well. He became a merry companion, 
and began to write odes. His prose clarified and 
set, that had before been very mixed and cloudy. 
He slept well ; he comprehended divine things ; he 
was already half a republican, when one fatal day — 
it was the feast of the eleven thousand virgins, and 
they were too busy up in heaven to consider the 
needs of us poor hobbling, polyktonous and be- 
tempted wretches of men — I went with him to the 
Society for the Prevention of Annoyances to the 
Rich, where a certain usurer's son was to read a 
paper on the cruelty of Spaniards to their mules. 
As we were all seated there round a table with a 
staring green cloth on it, and a damnable gas pen- 
dant above, the host of that evening offered him 
whisky and water, and, my back being turned, he 



UNDERVELIER 155 

took it. Then when I would have taken it from 
him he used these words — 

" After all, it is the intention of a pledge that 
matters"; and I saw that all was over, for he had 
abandoned definition, and was plunged back into 
the horrible mazes of Conscience and Natural Re- 
ligion. 

What do you think, then, was the consequence? 
Why, he had to take some nasty pledge or other to 
drink nothing whatever, and became a spectacle and 
a judgment, whereas if he had kept his exact word 
he might by this time have been a happy man. 

Remembering him and pondering upon the ad- 
vantage of strict rule, I hung on to my cart, taking 
care to let my feet still feel the road, and so passed 
through the high limestone gates of the gorge, and 
was in the fourth valley of the Jura, with the fifth 
ridge standing up black and huge before me against 
the last of the daylight. There were as yet no 
stars. 

There, in this silent place, was the little village 
of Undervelier, and I thanked the boy, withdrew 
from his cart, and painfully approached the inn, 
where I asked the woman if she could give me 
something to eat, and she said that she could in 
about an hour, using, however, with regard to what 



156 THE CIGAR 

it was I was to have words which I did not under- 
stand. For the French had become quite barbaric, 
and I was now indeed lost in one of the inner places 
of the world. 

A cigar is, however, even in Undervelier, a cigar ; 
and the best cost a penny. One of these, therefore, 
I bought, and then I went out smoking it into the 
village square, and, finding a low wall, leaned over 
it and contemplated the glorious clear green water 
tumbling and roaring along beneath it on the other 
side ; for a little river ran through the village. 

As I leaned there resting and communing I 
noticed how their church, close at hand, was built 
along the low banks of the torrent. I admired the 
luxuriance of the grass these waters fed, and the 
generous arch of the trees beside it. The graves 
seemed set in a natural place of rest and home, 
and just beyond this churchyard was that marriage 
of hewn stone and water which is the source of so 
peculiar a satisfaction ; for the church tower was 
built boldly right out into the stream and the 
current went eddying round it. But why it is that 
strong human building when it dips into water 
should thus affect the mind I cannot say, only I 
know that it is an emotion apart to see our device 
and structure where it is most enduring come up 



STONES AND WATER 157 

against and challenge that element which we cannot 
conquer and which has always in it something 
of danger for men. It is therefore well to put 
strong mouldings on to piers and quays, and to 
make an architecture of them, and so it was a 
splendid thought of the Romans to build their 
villas right out to sea; so they say does Venice en- 
thrall one, but where I have most noticed this thing 
is at the Mont St. Michel — only one must take care 
to shut one's eyes or sleep during all the low tide. 

As I was watching that stream against those old 
stones, my cigar being now half smoked, a bell 
began tolling, and it seemed as if the whole village 
were pouring into the church. At this I was very 
much surprised, not having been used at any time 
of my life to the unanimous devotion of an entire 
population, but having always thought of the Faith 
as something fighting odds, and having seen una- 
nimity only in places where some sham religion or 
other glozed over our tragedies and excused our 
sins. Certainly to see all the men, women, and 
children of a place taking Catholicism for granted 
was a new sight, and so I put my cigar carefully 
down under a stone on the top of the wall and went 
in with them. I then saw that what they were at 
was vespers. 



158 ON THE FAITH 

All the village sang, knowing the psalms very 
well, and I noticed that their Latin was nearer 
German than French ; but what was most pleasing 
of all was to hear from all the men and women 
together that very noble good-night and salutation 
to God which begins — 

"Te, lucis ante terminum.'* 

My whole mind was taken up and transfigured by 
this collective act, and I saw for a moment the 
Catholic Church quite plain, and I remembered 
Europe, and the centuries. Then there left me alto- 
gether that attitude of difficulty and combat which, 
for us others, is always associated with the Faith. 
The cities dwindled in my imagination, and I took 
less heed of the modern noise. I went out with them 
into the clear evening and the cool. I found my 
cigar and lit it again, and musing much more deeply 
than before, not without tears, I considered the 
nature of Belief. 

Of its nature it breeds a reaction and an indiffer- 
ence. Those who believe nothing but only think 
and judge cannot understand this. Of its nature it 
struggles with us. And we, we, when our youth 
is full on us invariably reject it and set out in the 
sunlight content with natural things. Then for a 



ON THE FAITH 159 

long time we are like men who follow down the 
cleft of a mountain and the peaks are hidden from 
us and forgotten. It takes years to reach the dry 
plain, and then we look back and see our home. 

What is it, do you think, that causes the return? 
I think it is the problem of living ; for every day, 
every experience of evil, demands a solution. That 
solution is provided by the memory of the great 
scheme which at last we remember. Our childhood 
pierces through again. . . . But I will not attempt to 
explain it, for I have not the power ; only I know 
that we who return suffer hard things ; for there 
grows a gulf between us and many companions. We 
are perpetually thrust into minorities, and the world 
almost begins to talk a strange language ; we are 
troubled by the human machinery of a perfect 
and superhuman revelation ; we are over-anxious 
for its safety, alarmed, and in danger of violent 
decisions. 

And this is hard : that the Faith begins to 
make one abandon the old way of judging. 
Averages and movements and the rest grow un- 
certain. We see things from within and consider 
one mind or a little group as a salt or leaven. 
The very nature of social force seems changed to 
us. And this is hard when a man has loved 



160 ON THE FAITH 

common views and is happy only with his fel- 
lows. 

And this again is very hard, that we must once 
more take up that awful struggle to reconcile two 
truths and to keep civic freedom sacred in spite of 
the organisation of religion, and not to deny what is 
certainly true. It is hard to accept mysteries, and 
to be humble. We are tost as the great schoolmen 
were tost, and we dare not neglect the duty of that 
wrestling. 

But the hardest thing of all is that it leads us 
away, as by a command, from all that banquet of 
the intellect than which there is no keener joy 
known to man. 

I went slowly up the village place in the dusk, 
thinking of this deplorable weakness in men that 
the Faith is too great for them, and accepting it as 
an inevitable burden. I continued to muse with 
my eyes upon the ground. . . . 

There was to be no more of that studious content, 
that security in historic analysis, and that constant 
satisfaction of an appetite which never cloyed. A 
wisdom more imperative and more profound was to 
put a term to the comfortable wisdom of learning. 
All the balance of judgment, the easy, slow convic- 
tions, the broad grasp of things, the vision of their 



STILL ON FAITH 161 

complexity, the pleasure in their innumerable life — 
all that had to be given up. Fanaticisms were no 
longer entirely to be despised, just appreciations 
and a strong grasp of reality no longer entirely to 
be admired. 

The Catholic Church will have no philosophies. 
She will permit no comforts ; the cry of the martyrs 
is in her far voice ; her eyes that see beyond the 
world present us heaven and hell to the confusion 
of our human reconciliations, our happy blending 
of good and evil things. 

By the Lord ! I begin to think this intimate 
religion as tragic as a great love. There came back 
into my mind a relic that I have in my house. It is 
a panel of the old door of my college, having carved 
on it my college arms. I remembered the Lion and 
the Shield, Haec fuit^ Haec almae janua sacra domus. 
Yes, certainly religion is as tragic as first love, and 
drags us out into the void away from our dear homes. 

It is a good thing to have loved one woman from 
a child, and it is a good thing not to have to return 
to the Faith. 

They cook worse in Undervelier than any place I 
was ever in, with the possible exception of Omaha, 
Neb. 



162 ON STYLE 

Lector. Why do you use phrases like "possible 
exception " ? 

Auctor. Why not ? I see that all the reli- 
gion I have stuck into the book has no more 
effect on you than had Rousseau upon Sir Henry 
Maine. You are as full of Pride as a minor 
Devil. You would avoid the cliche and the com- 
monplace, and the phrase toute faite. Why? Not 
because you naturally write odd prose — contrari- 
wise, left to yourself you write pure journalese ; but 
simply because you are swelled and puffed up with 
a desire to pose. You want what the Martha 
Brown school calls " distinction " in prose. My 
little friend, I know how it is done, and I find it 
contemptible. People write their articles at full 
speed, putting down their unstudied and valueless 
conclusions in English as pale as a film of dirty 
wax — sometimes even they dictate to a typewriter. 
Then they sit over it with a blue pencil and care- 
fully transpose the split infinitives, and write alter- 
native adjectives, and take words away out of their 
natural place in the sentence and generally put the 
Queen's English — yes, the Queen's English — on 
the rack. And who is a penny the better for it ? The 
silly authors get no real praise, not even in the 
horrible stucco villas where their clique meet on 



MORE ON STYLE 163 

Sundays. The poor public buys the Marvel and 
gasps at the cleverness of the writing and despairs, 
and has to read what it can understand, and is 
driven back to toshy novels about problems, 
written by cooks. " The hungry sheep," as some 
one says somewhere, "look up and are not fed"; 
and the same poet well describes your pipings as 
being on wretched straw pipes that are " scrannel " 
— a good word. 

Oh, for one man who should write healthy, 
hearty, straightforward English ! Oh, for Cobbett ! 
There are indeed some great men who write 
twistedly simply because they cannot help it, but 
their honesty is proved by the mass they turn out. 
What do you turn out, you higglers and sticklers ? 
Perhaps a bad triolet every six months and a book 
of criticism on something thoroughly threadbare 
once in five years. If I had my way 

Lector. I am sorry to have provoked all this. 

Auctor. Not at all ! Not at all ! I trust I 
have made myself clear. 

Well, as I was saying, they cook worse at 
Undervelier than any place I was ever in, with 
the possible exception of Omaha, Neb. However, 
I forgave them, because they were such good people, 
and after a short and bitter night I went out in 



164 THE GERMAN 

the morning before the sun rose and took the 
Moutier road. 

The valley in which I was now engaged — the 
phrase seems familiar — was more or less like an f-j. 
That is, there were two high parallel ranges bound- 
ing it, but across the middle a low ridge of perhaps 
a thousand feet. The road slowly climbed this 
ridge through pastures where cows with deep-toned 
bells were rising from the dew on the grass, and 
where one or two little cottages and a village 
already sent up smoke. All the way up I was 
thinking of the surfeit of religion I had had the 
night before, and also of how I had started that 
morning without bread or coffee, which was a 
folly. 

When I got to the top of the ridge there was 
a young man chopping wood outside a house, and 
I asked him in French how far it was to Moutier. 
He answered in German, and I startled him by 
a loud cry, such as sailors give when they see land, 
for at last I had struck the boundary of the 
languages, and was with pure foreigners for the 
first time in my life. I also asked him for coffee, 
and as he refused it I took him to be a heretic and 
went down the road making up verses against 
all sucn, and singing them loudly through the 



HERETICS 16c 

forest that now arched over me and grew deeper as 
I descended. 

And my first verse was — 

" Heretics all, whoever you be, 

In Tarbes or Nimes, or over the sea, 
You never shall have good words from me. 
Caritas non conturbat me." 

If you ask me why I put a Latin line at the 
end, it was because I had to show that it was a 
song connected with the Universal Fountain and 
with European culture, and with all that Heresy 
combats. I sang it to a lively hymn-tune that I 
had invented for the occasion. 

I then thought what a fine fellow I was, and 
how pleasant were my friends when I agreed with 
them. I made up this second verse, which I sang 
even more loudly than the first ; and the forest 
grew deeper, sending back echoes — 

" But Catholic men that live upon wine 

Are deep in the water, and frank, and fine ; 
Wherever I travel I find it so, 
Benedicamus Domino. ," 

There is no doubt, however, that if one is really 
doing a catholic work, and expressing one's attitude 
to the world, charity, pity, and a great sense of fear 



166 HERETICS 

should possess one, or, at least, appear. So I made 
up this third verse and sang it to suit — 

" On childing women that arc forlorn, 

And men that sweat in nothing but scorn : 
That is on all that ever were born, 
Miserere Domine." 

Then, as everything ends in death, and as that 
is just what Heretics least like to be reminded of, 
I ended thus — 

" To my poor self on my deathbed, 
And all my dear companions dead, 
Because of the love that I bore them, 
Dona Eis Requiem" 

I say " I ended." But I did not really end there, 
for I also wrote in the spirit of the rest a verse of 
Mea Culpa and Confession of Sin, but I shall not 
print it here. 

So my song over and the woods now left behind, 
I passed up a dusty piece of road into Moutier, a 
detestable town, all whitewashed and orderly, down 
under the hills. 

I was tired, for the sun was now long risen and 
somewhat warm, and I had walked ten miles, and 
that over a high ridge ; and I had written a canticle 
and sung it — and all that without a sup or a bite. 
I therefore took bread, coffee, and soup in Moutier, 



EVERYDAY LIFE 167 

and then going a little way out of the town I 
crossed a stream off the road, climbed a knoll, and, 
lying under a tree, I slept. 

I awoke and took the road. 

The road after Moutier was not a thing for lyrics ; 
it stirred me in no way. It was bare in the sun- 
light, had fields on either side ; in the fields stood 
houses. In the houses were articulately-speaking 
mortal men. 

There is a school of Poets (I cannot read them 
myself) who treat of common things, and their 
admirers tell us that these men raise the things 
of everyday life to the plane of the supernatural. 
Note that phrase, for it is a shaft of light through 
a cloud revealing their disgusting minds. 

Everyday life ! As La Croix said in a famous 
leading article: " La Presse? Pooh!" I know 
that everyday life. It goes with sandals and 
pictures of lean ugly people all just like one an- 
other in browny photographs on the wall, and 
these pictures are called, one " The House of 
Life," or another, " The Place Beautiful," or yet 
again a third, "The Lamp of the Valley," and when 
you complain and shift about uneasily before these 
pictures, the scrub-minded and dusty-souled owners 



168 HORRORS THEREOF 

of them tell you that of course in photographs 
you lose the marvellous colour of the original. 
This everyday life has mantelpieces made of the 
same stuff as cafe-tables, so that by instinct I 
try to make rings on them with my wine-glass, 
and the people who suffer this life get up every 
morning at eight, and the poor sad men of the 
house slave at wretched articles and come home 
to hear more literature and more appreciations, 
and the unholy women do nothing and attend 
to local government, that is, the oppression of 
the poor ; and altogether this accursed everyday 
life of theirs is instinct with the four sins crying 
to heaven for vengeance, and there is no humanity 
in it, and no simplicity, and no recollection. I 
know whole quarters of the towns of that life 
where they have never heard of Virtus or Vere- 
cundia or Pietas. 

Lector. Then 

Auctor. Alas ! alas ! Dear Lector, in these 
houses there is no honest dust. Not a bottle of 
good wine or bad ; no prints inherited from one's 
uncle, and no children's books by Mrs. Barbauld 
or Miss Edgeworth; no human disorder, nothing of 
that organic comfort which makes a man's house 
like a bear's fur for him. They have no debts, 



EXAMPLES 169 

they do not read in bed, and they will have diffi- 
culty in saving their souls. 

Lector. Then tell me, how would you treat 
of common things ? 

Auctor. Why, I would leave them alone ; but 
if I had to treat of them I will show you how 
I would do it. Let us have a dialogue about this 
road from Moutier. 

Lector. By all means. 

Auctor. What a terrible thing it is to miss 
one's sleep. I can hardly bear the heat of the road, 
and my mind is empty ! 

Lector. Why, you have just slept in a wood ! 

Auctor. Yes, but that is not enough. One 
must sleep at night. 

Lector. My brother often complains of in- 
somnia. He is a policeman. 

Auctor. Indeed? It is a sad affliction. 

Lector. Yes, indeed. 

Auctor. Indeed, yes. 

Lector. I cannot go on like this. 

Auctor. There. That is just what I was saying. 
One cannot treat of common things : it is not 
literature ; and for my part, if I were the editor 
even of a magazine, and the author stuck in a 
string of dialogue, I would not pay him by the 



iyo PLAYS WITHOUT 

page but by the word, and I would count off 
5 per cent, for epigrams, 10 per cent, for dialect, 
and some quarter or so for those stage directions 
in italics which they use to pad out their work. 

So. I will not repeat this experiment, but next 
time I come to a bit of road about which there 
is nothing to say, I will tell a story or sing a song, 
and to that I pledge myself. 

By the way, I am reminded of something. Do 
you know those books and stories in which parts of 
the dialogues often have no words at all ? Only 
dots and dashes and asterisks and interrogations? 
I wonder what the people are paid for it? If I 
knew I would earn a mint of money, for I believe 
I have a talent for it. Look at this — 

The Duchess. ? ? ? ? ? 

Charles. ! 

The Duchess. ! ! ! ! ! 

Clara (sobs), l^l^l^l^l^ 

The Duchess (To Major Charles). jg@ a> 

Charles, vwvwww^wv^ (exit). 

The Duchess (To Clara, sharply). %%%%%%? 

Clara. 



WORDS tfl 

The Duchess (In great anger). ? Jf * || § $ 

HtX! 

Clara. ■■ i^m hbb mh 

There. That seems to me worth a good deal 
more money than all the modern " delineation of 
character," and " folk " nonsense ever written. 
What verve ! What terseness ! And yet how 
clear ! 

Lector. Let us be getting on. 

Auctor. By all means, and let us consider more 
enduring things. 

After a few miles, the road going upwards, I 
passed through another gap in the hills and 

Lector. Pardon me, but I am still ruminating 
upon that little tragedy of yours. Why was the 
guardian a duchess ? 

Auctor. Well, it was a short play and modern, 
was it not ? 

Lector. Yes. And therefore, of course, you 
must have a title in it. I know that. I do not 
object to it. What I want to know is, why a 
duchess ? 

Auctor. On account of the reduction of scale: 
the concentration of the thing. You see in the full 



17* THE ACOLYTE 

play there would have been a lord, two baronets, 
and say three ladies, and I could have put suitable 
words into their mouths. As it was I had to make 
absolutely sure of the element of nobility without 
any help, and, as it were, in one startling moment. 
Do you follow? Is it not art? 

I cannot conceive why a pilgrimage, an adventure 
so naturally full of great, wonderful, far-off and 
holy things should breed such fantastic nonsense as 
all this ; but remember at least the little acolyte of 
Rheims, whose father, in 151 2, seeing him apt for 
religion, put him into a cassock and designed him 
for the Church, whereupon the youngling began to 
be as careless and devilish as Mercury, putting 
beeswax on the misericords, burning feathers in the 
censer, and even going round himself with the plate 
without leave and scolding the rich in loud whispers 
when they did not put in enough. So one way 
with another they sent him home to his father; the 
archbishop thrusting him out of the south porch 
with his own hands and giving him the Common or 
Ferial Malediction, which is much the same as that 
used by carters to stray dogs. 

When his father saw him he fumed terribly, curs- 
ing like a pagan, and asking whether his son were a 
roysterer fit for the gallows as well as a fool fit for 



OF RHEIMS 173 

a cassock. On hearing which complaint the son 
very humbly and contritely said — 

" It is not my fault but the contact with the things 
of the Church that makes me gambol and frisk, just 
as the Devil they say is a good enough fellow left to 
himself and is only moderately heated, yet when you 
put him into holy water all the world is witness how 
he hisses and boils." 

The boy then taking a little lamb which hap- 
pened to be in the drawing-room, said — 

" Father, see this little lamb ; how demure he 
is and how simple and innocent, and how foolish 
and how tractable. Yet observe ! " With that he 
whipped the cassock from his arm where he was 
carrying it and threw it all over the lamb, covering 
his head and body ; and the lamb began plunging 
and kicking and bucking and rolling and heaving 
and sliding and rearing and pawing and most 
vigorously wrestling with the clerical and hier- 
archically constraining garment of darkness, and 
bleating all the while more and more angrily 
and loudly, for all the world like the great goat 
Baphomet himself when the witches dance about 
him on all-hallowe'en. But when the boy suddenly 
plucked off the cassock again, the lamb, after 
sneezing a little and finding his feet, became quite 



i 7 4 THE MILLS 

gentle once more and looked only a little confused 
and dazed. 

" There, father," said the hoy, " is proof to you 
of how the meekest may be driven to desperation 
by the shackles I speak of and which I pray you 
never lay upon me again." 

His father finding him so practical and wise 
made over his whole fortune and business to him, 
and thus escaped the very heavy Heriot and Death 
Dues of those days, for he was a Socage tenant 
of St. Remi in Double Burgage. But we stopped 
all that here in England by the Statute of Uses, 
and I must be getting back to the road before 
the dark catches me. 

As I was saying, I came to a gap in the hills, and 
there was there a house or two called Gansbrunnen, 
and one of the houses was an inn. Just by the inn the 
road turned away sharply up the valley; the very last 
slope of the Jura, the last parallel ridge, lay straight 
before me all solemn, dark and wooded, and making 
a high feathery line against the noon. To cross 
this there was but a vague path rather misleading, 
and the name of the mountain was Weissenstein. 

So before that last effort which should lead me 
over those thousands of feet, and to nourish Instinct 



OF GOD 175 

(which would be of use to me when I got into that 
impenetrable wood), I turned into the inn for wine. 

A very old woman having the appearance of a 
witch sat at a dark table by the little criss-cross 
window of the dark room. She was crooning to 
herself, and I made the sign of the evil eye and 
asked her in French for wine ; but French she did not 
understand. Catching, however, two words which 
sounded like the English "White" and "Red," 
I said " Yaw " after the last and nodded, and she 
brought up a glass of exceedingly good red wine 
which I drank in silence, she watching me uncannily. 

Then I paid her with a five-franc piece, and 
she gave me a quantity of small change rapidly, 
which, as I counted it, I found to contain one 
Greek piece of fifty lepta very manifestly of lead. 
This I held up angrily before her, and (not without 
courage, for it is hard to deal with the darker 
powers) I recited to her slowly that familiar verse 
which the well-known Satyricus Empiricus was for- 
ever using in his now classical attacks on the 
grammarians ; and without any Alexandrian twaddle 
of accents I intoned to her — 

" 6if/e 6eo)V dXeova-L fivXoi, aXeovai 8e Xc7rra," 

and so left her astounded to repentance or to shame. 



176 EDGE OK THE JURA 

Then I went out into the sunlight, and crossing 
over running water put myself out of her power. 

The wood went up darkly and the path branched 
here and there so that I was soon uncertain of my 
way, but I followed generally what seemed to me 
the most southerly course, and so came at last up 
steeply through a dip or ravine that ended high on 
the crest of the ridge. 

Just as I came to the end of the rise, after 
perhaps an hour, perhaps two, of that great cur- 
tain of forest which had held the mountain side, 
the trees fell away to brushwood, there was a gate, 
and then the path was lost upon a fine open sward 
which was the very top of the Jura and the coping 
of that multiple wall which defends the Swiss Plain. 
I had crossed it straight from edge to edge, never 
turning out of my way. 

It was too marshy to lie down on it, so I stood 
a moment to breathe and look about me. 

It was evident that nothing higher remained, for 
though anew line of wood — firs and beeches — stood 
before me, yet nothing appeared above them, and 
I knew that they must be the fringe of the descent. 
I approached this edge of wood, and saw that it 
had a rough fence of post and rails bounding it, 



BETWEEN THE TREES 



177 



and as I was looking for the entry of a path (for 
my original path was lost, as such tracks are, in 
the damp grass of the little down) there came to 
me one of those great revelations which betray to 
us suddenly the higher things and stand afterwards 
firm in our minds. 




There, on this upper meadow, where so far I 
had felt nothing but the ordinary gladness of The 
Summit, I had a vision. 

What was it I saw? If you think I saw this or 
that, and if you think I am inventing the words, 
you know nothing of men. 

I saw between the branches of the trees in front 
of me a sight in the sky that made me stop breath- 
ing, just as great danger at sea, or great surprise 



12 



178 THE VISION 

in love, or a great deliverance will make a man 
stop breathing. I saw something I had known in 
the West as a boy, something I had never seen so 
grandly discovered as was this. In between the 
branches of the trees was a great promise of un- 
expected lights beyond. 

I pushed left and right along that edge of the 
forest and along the fence that bound it, until I 
found a place where the pine-trees stopped, leaving 
a gap, and where on the right, beyond the gap, 
was a tree whose leaves had failed ; there the 
ground broke away steeply below me, and the 
beeches fell, one below the other, like a vast 
cascade, towards the limestone cliffs that dipped 
down still further, beyond my sight. I looked 
through this framing hollow and praised God. 
.For there below me, thousands of feet below me, 
was what seemed an illimitable plain ; at the end of 
that world was an horizon, and the dim bluish sky 
that overhangs an horizon. 

There was brume in it and thickness. One saw 
the sky beyond the edge of the world getting 
purer as the vault rose. But right up — a belt in 
that empyrean — ran peak and field and needle of 
intense ice, remote, remote from the world. Sky 
beneath them and sky above them, a steadfast 



OF THE ALPS 179 

legion, they glittered as though with the armour 
of the immovable armies of Heaven. Two days' 
march, three days' march away, they stood up like 
the walls of Eden. I say it again, they stopped 
my breath. I had seen them. 

So little are we, we men : so much are we 
immersed in our muddy and immediate interests 
that we think, by numbers and recitals, to com- 
prehend distance or time, or any of our limiting 
infinities. Here were these magnificent creatures of 
God, I mean the Alps, which now for the first time 
I saw from the height of the Jura ; and because 
they were fifty or sixty miles away, and because 
they were a mile or two high, they were become 
something different from us others, and could 
strike one motionless with the awe of supernatural 
things. Up there in the sky, to which only clouds 
belong and birds and the last trembling colours 
of pure light, they stood fast and hard; not moving 
as do the things of the sky. They were as distant 
as the little upper clouds of summer, as fine and 
tenuous ; but in their reflection and in their quality 
as it were of weapons (like spears and shields of 
an unknown array) they occupied the sky with a 
sublime invasion : and the things proper to the sky 
were forgotten by me in their presence as I gazed. 



180 THE ALPS 

To what emotion shall I compare this astonish- 
ment ? So, in first love one finds that this can 
belong to me. 

Their sharp steadfastness and their clean uplifted 
lines compelled my adoration. Up there, the sky 
above and below them, part of the sky, but part 
of us, the great peaks made communion between 
that homing creeping part of me which loves 
vineyards and dances and a slow movement among 
pastures, and that other part which is only pro- 
perly at home in Heaven. I say that this kind 
of description is useless, and that it is better to 
address prayers to such things than to attempt to 
interpret them for others. 

These, the great Alps, seen thus, link one in 
some way to one's immortality. Nor is it possible 
to convey, or even to suggest, those few fifty miles, 
and those few thousand feet ; there is something 
more. Let me put it thus : that from the height 
of Weissenstein I saw, as it were, my religion. I 
mean, humility, the fear of death, the terror of 
height and of distance, the glory of God, the 
infinite potentiality of reception whence springs 
that divine thirst of the soul ; my aspiration also 
towards completion, and my confidence in the dual 
destiny. For I know that we laughers have a gross 



THEIR PICTURE 181 

cousinship with the most high, and it is this con- 
trast and perpetual quarrel which feeds a spring of 
merriment in the soul of a sane man. 

Since I could now see such a wonder and it 
could work such things in my mind, therefore, 




l! 



some day I should be part of it. That is what 
I felt. 

This it is also which leads some men to climb 
mountain-tops, but not me, for I am afraid of 
slipping down. 

Then you will say, if I felt all this, why do I 
draw it, and put it in my book, seeing that my 
drawings are only for fun ? My jest drags down 
such a memory and makes it ludicrous. Well, 



182 REMEDY FOR IT 

T said in my beginning that I would note down 
whatever most impressed me, except figures, which 
I cannot draw (I mean figures of human beings, 
for mathematical figures I can draw well enough), 
and I have never failed in this promise, except 
where, as in the case of Porrentruy, my drawing 
was blown away by the wind and lost — it anything 
ever is lost. So I put down here this extraordi- 
nary drawing of what I saw, which is about as much 
like it as a printed song full of misprints is to that 
same song sung by an army on the march. And 
I am consoled by remembering that if I could draw 
infinitely well, then it would become sacrilege to 
attempt to draw that sight. Moreover, I am not 
going to waste any more time discussing why I 
put in this little drawing. If it disturbs your 
conception of what it was I saw, paste over it a 
little bit of paper. I have made it small for the 
purpose; but remember that the paper should be 
thin and opaque, for thick paper will interfere with 
the shape of this book, and transparent paper will 
disturb you with a memory of the picture. 

It was all full of this, as a man is full of music 
just after hearing it, that I plunged down into 
the steep forest that led towards the great plain ; 



THE CLIFF 



183 



then, having found a path, I worked zig-zag down 
it by a kind of gully that led through to a place 
where the limestone cliffs were broken, and (so 
my map told me) to the town of Soleure, which 
stands at the edge of the plain upon the river 
Aar. 

I was an hour or more going down the enormous 
face of the Jura, which is here an escarpment, a 
cliff of great height, and con- 
tains but few such breaks by 
which men can pick their 
way. It was when I was 
about half-way down the 
mountain side that its vast- 
ness most impressed me. And 
yet it had been but a plat- 
form as it were, from which 
to view the Alps and their 
much greater sublimity. 

This vastness, even of these 
limestone mountains, took me 
especially at a place where 
the path bordered a steep, 
or rather precipitous, lift of 
white rock to which only here and there a tree 
could cling. 




i8 4 THE PLAIN 

I was still very high up, but looking somewhat 
more eastward than before, and the plain went on 
illimitably towards some low vague hills; nor in 
that direction could any snow be seen in the skv. 
Then at last I came to the slopes which make a 
little bank under the mountains, and there, finding 
a highroad, and oppressed somewhat suddenly 
by the afternoon heat of those low places, I went 
on more slowly towards Soleure. 

Beside me, on the road, were many houses, shaded 
by great trees, built of wood, and standing apart. 
To each of them almost was a little water-wheel, 
run by the spring which came down out of the 
ravine. The water-wheel in most cases worked a 
simple little machine for sawing planks, but in other 
cases it seemed used for some purpose inside the 
house, which I could not divine ; perhaps for 
spinning. 

All this place was full of working, and the men 
sang and spoke at their work in German, which I 
could not understand. I did indeed find one man, 
a young hay-making man carrying a scythe, who 
knew a little French and was going my way. 1 
asked him, therefore, to teach me German, but he 
had not taught me much before we were at the 
gates of the old town and then I left him. It 



SOLEURE 



185 



is thus, you will see, that for my next four days 
or five, which were passed among the German- 
speaking Swiss, I was utterly alone. 



This book must not go on 
for ever ; therefore 1 cannot 
say very much about Soleure, 
although there is a great deal 
to be said about it. It is dis- 
tinguished by an impression 
of unity, and of civic life, 
which I had already discovered 
in all these Swiss towns; for 
though men talk of finding 
the Middle Ages here or there, 
I for my part never find it, 
save where there has been de- 
mocracy to preserve it. Thus 
I have seen the Middle Ages 
especially alive in the small 
towns of Northern France, and 
I have seen the Middle Ages 
in the University of Paris. 
Here also in Switzerland. As 
I had seen it at St. Ursanne, 
so I found it now at Soleure. 







% . 



\ ft 

ft 
lb.. 

r 

1 



186 THE REMOTE INN 

There were huge gates flanking the town, and there 
was that evening a continual noise of rifles, at which 
the Swiss are for ever practising. Over the church, 
however, I saw something terribly seventeenth cen- 
tury, namely, Jaweh in great Hebrew letters upon 
its front. 

Well, dining there of the best they had to give 
me (for this was another milestone in my pilgrim- 
age), I became foolishly refreshed and valiant, and 
instead of sleeping in Soleure, as a wise man would 
have done, I determined, though it was now nearly 
dark, to push on upon the road to Burgdorf. 

I therefore crossed the river Aar, which is here 
magnificently broad and strong, and has bastions 
jutting out into it in a very bold fashion. I saw 
the last colourless light of evening making its waters 
seem like dull metal between the gloomy banks ; I 
felt the beginnings of fatigue, and half regretted my 
determination. But as it is quite certain that one 
should never go back, I went on in the darkness, I 
do not know how many miles, till I reached some 
cross roads and an inn. 

This inn was very poor, and the people had never 
heard in their lives, apparently, that a poor man 
on foot might not be able to talk German, which 
seemed to me an astonishing thing; and as I sat 



THE GOOD SAVAGES 187 

there ordering beer for myself and for a number 
of peasants (who but for this would have me 
their butt, and even as it was found something 
monstrous in me), I pondered during my continual 
attempts to converse with them (for I had picked 
up some ten words of their language) upon the folly 
of those who imagine the world to be grown smaller 
by railways. 

I suppose this place was more untouched, as the 
phrase goes, that is, more living, more intense, 
and more powerful to affect others, whenever it 
may be called to do so, than are even the dear 
villages of Sussex that lie under my downs. For 
those are haunted by a nearly cosmopolitan class 
of gentry, who will have actors, financiers, and 
what not to come and stay with them, and who 
read the paper, and from time to time address 
their village folk upon matters of politics. But 
here, in this broad plain by the banks of the 
Emmen, they knew of nothing but themselves 
and the Church which is the common bond of 
Europe, and they were in the right way. Hence 
it was doubly hard on me that they should think 
me such a stranger. 

When I had become a little morose at their per- 
petual laughter, I asked for a bed, and the landlady, 



188 THE GERMAN AIR 

a woman of some talent, showed me on her fingers 
that the beds were 50c., 75c., and a franc. I deter- 
mined upon the best, and was given indeed ;i very 
pleasant room, having in it the statue of a saint, and 
full of a country air. But I had done too much in 
this night march, as you will presently learn, for my 
next day was a day without salt, and in it apprecia- 
tion left me. And this breakdown of appreciation 
was due to what I did not know at the time to be 
fatigue, but to what was undoubtedly a deep inner 
exhaustion. 

When I awoke next morning it was as it always is : 
no one was awake, and I had the field to myself, to 
slip out as I chose. I looked out of window into the 
dawn. The race had made its own surroundings. 

These people who suffocated with laughter at the 
idea of one's knowing no German, had produced, 
as it were, a German picture by the mere influence 
of years and years of similar thoughts. 

Out of my window I saw the eaves coming low 
down. I saw an apple-tree against the grey light. 
The tangled grass in the little garden, the dog- 
kennel, and the standing butt were all what I had 
seen in those German pictures which they put into 
books for children, and which are drawn in thick 



LONELINESS 189 

black lines : nor did I see any reason why tame faces 
should not appear in that framework. I expected 
the light lank hair and the heavy uplifting step of 
the people whose only emotions are in music. 

But it was too early for any one to be about, and 
my German garden, si fose m exprimer ainsi, had 
to suffice me for an impression of the Central 
Europeans. I gazed at it a little while as it grew 
lighter. Then I went downstairs and slipped the 
latch (which, being German, was of a quaint design). 
I went out into the road and sighed profoundly. 

All that day was destined to be covered, so far as 
my spirit was concerned, with a motionless lethargy. 
Nothing seemed properly to interest or to concern 
me, and not till evening was I visited by any muse. 
Even my pain (which was now dull and chronic) 
was no longer a subject for my entertainment, and 
I suffered from an uneasy isolation that had not 
the merit of sharpness and was no spur to the 
mind. I had the feeling that every one I might see 
would be a stranger, and that their language would 
be unfamiliar to me, and this, unlike most men who 
travel, I had never felt before. 

The reason being this: that if a man has English 
thoroughly he can wander over a great part of the 
world familiarly, and meet men with whom he can 



190 ISOLATION 

talk. And if he has French thoroughly all Italy, 
and I suppose Spain, certainly Belgium, are open to 
him. Not perhaps that he will understand what 
he hears or will be understood of others, but that 
the order and nature of the words and the gestures 
accompanying them are his own. Here, however, 
I, to whom English and French were the same, 
was to spend (it seemed) whole days among a 
people who put their verbs at the end, where the 
curses or the endearments come in French and 
English, and many of whose words stand for ideas 
we have not got. I had no room for good-fellow- 
ship. I could not sit at tables and expand the air 
with terrible stories of adventure, nor ask about 
their politics, nor provoke them to laughter or 
sadness by my tales. It seemed a poor pilgrimage 
taken among dumb men. 

Also I have no doubt that I had experienced the 
ebb of some vitality, for it is the saddest thing 
about us that this bright spirit with which we are 
lit from within like lanterns, can suffer dimness. 
Such frailty makes one fear that extinction is our 
final destiny, and it saps us with numbness, and 
we are less than ourselves. Seven nights had I 
been on pilgrimage, and two of them had I passed 
in the open. Seven great heights had I climbed : the 



DESOLATION 191 

Forest, Archettes, the Ballon, the Mont Terrible, 
the Watershed, the pass by Moutier, the Weissen- 
stein. Seven depths had I fallen to : twice to the 
Moselle, the gap of Belfort, the gorge of the 
Doubs, Glovelier valley, the hole of Moutier, and 
now this plain of the Aar. I had marched 180 
miles. It was no wonder that on this eighth day 
I was oppressed and that all the night long I drank 
no good wine, met no one to remember well, nor 
sang any songs. All this part of my way was full 
of what they call Duty, and I was sustained only 
by my knowledge that the vast mountains (which 
had disappeared) would be part of my life very 
soon if I still went on steadily towards Rome. 

The sun had risen when I reached Burgdorf, and 
I there went to a railway station, and outside of it 
drank coffee and ate bread. I also bought old news- 
papers in French, and looked at everything wearily 
and with sad eyes. There was nothing to draw. How 
can a man draw pain in the foot and knee? And 
that was all there was remarkable at that moment. 

I watched a train come in. It was full of 
tourists, who (it may have been a subjective 
illusion) seemed to me common and worthless 
people, and sad into the bargain. It was going 
to Interlaken ; and I felt a languid contempt for 



1 9 2 



Tl IE ALTERNA1 I\ I 



people who went to Intcrhik.cn instead of driving 
right across the great hills to Rome. 

After an hour or so of this melancholy dawd- 
ling, I put ;i map before me on a little marble 

table, ordered some more coffee, and blew into m\ 







noun 



-- uiriilt*.. 



tepid life a moment of warmth by the effort of 
coming to a necessary decision. 1 had (for the 
first time since I had left Lorraine) the choice oi 
two roads; and why this was so the following map 
will make clear. 

Here you see that there is no possibility or 
following the straight way to Rome, but that one 



\ DAI wi i Hoi i \i i 

mutt go a • es east or we 

•ic ha* • the ton 

: Bur^.: »n the I' mmen. 

ic might follow the Kmmcn all the 
-ecmed that the road c 
a gorge that way, whereas Sy the other (whu 
i»ht) the road is good (it seen 
So I chose ll way, 

», at the 

., then to the I , 

icn aga 
I » I 

lil think no* tell me — what can it profit 

gcogra; 

*n gra* 

I . . til was 

•mething had stopped working. 

«hould 

»r Send a pen: 

— a man \ou never knew - 

at can ao 



i 9 4 IN ALL THESE 

also is from God, and we should never be proud of 
it as though it were from ourselves, but we should 
accept it as a kind of present, and we should be 
thankful for it; just as a man should thank God 
for his reason, as did the madman in the Story 
of the Rose, who thanked God that he at least 
was sane though all the rest of the world had 
recently lost their reason. 

Indeed, this defaillance and breakdown which 
comes from time to time over the mind is a very 
sad thing, but it can be made of great use to us 
if we will draw from it the lesson that we our- 
selves are nothing. Perhaps it is a grace. Perhaps 
in these moments our minds repose. . . . Any- 
how, a day without salt. 

You understand that under (or in) these cir- 
cumstances 

When I was at Oxford there was a great and 
terrible debate that shook the Empire, and that 
intensely exercised the men whom we send out to 
govern the Empire, and which, therefore, must 
have had its effect upon the Empire, as to whether 
one should say " under these circumstances " or 
" in these circumstances " ; nor did I settle matters 
by calling a conclave and suggesting Quae quutn 
ita sint as a common formula, because a new debate 



CIRCUMSTANCES 



195 



arose upon when you should say sint and when 
you should say sunt, and they all wrangled like 
kittens in a basket. 

Until there rose a deep-voiced man from an 
outlying college, who said, " For my part I will 
say that under these circumstances, or in these 
circumstances, or in spite of these circumstances, 
or hovering playfully above these circumstances, 
or — 



Burrowing under 
Plodding up to 
Recognising 
Refusing 
Attacking 

Warily approaching 
Wholly pooh-poohing 
Somewhat confusing 
Honestly accepting 
Very stoutly criticising 
Humorously bantering 
Vigorously regarding 
Ironically receiving 



Brutally denying 
Jovially ragging 
Pertinaciously tracking 
Loudly deploring 
Practically considering 
Angrily rejecting 
Exactly weighing 
Largely comprehending 
Narrowly analysing 
Strictly confining 
Genially admitting 
Ferociously damning 
Urbanely neglecting 



Gently deprecating 
Cynically questioning 
Hugely denouncing 
Pettily belittling 
Silently absorbing 
Honestly doubting 
and, 
in the last place, 
Occasionally eliminating 



i 9 6 THE HUNGRY STUDENT 

I take you all for Fools and Pedants, in the Chief, 
in the Chevron, and in the quarter Fess. Fools 
absolute, and Pedants lordless. Free Fools, un- 
landed Fools, and Fools incommensurable, and 
Pedants displayed and rampant of the Tierce 
Major. Fools incalculable and Pedants irreparable ; 
indeed, the arch Fool-pedants in a universe of 
pedantic folly and foolish pedantry, O you pedant- 
fools of the world ! " 

But by this time he was alone, and thus was this 
great question never properly decided. 

Under these circumstances, then (or in these 
circumstances), it would profit you but little if I 
were to attempt the description of the Valley of 
the Emmen, of the first foot-hills of the Alps, and 
of the very uninteresting valley which runs on from 
Langnau. 

I had best employ my time in telling the story of 
the Hungry Student. 

Lector. And if you are so worn-out and bereft 
of all emotions, how can you tell a story? 

Auctor. These two conditions permit me. 
First, that I am writing some time after, and 
that I have recovered ; secondly, that the story is 
not mine, but taken straight out of that nationalist 
newspaper which had served me so long to wrap up 



FAILS TO APPEAR 197 

my bread and bacon in my haversack. This is the 
story, and I will tell it you. 

Now, I think of it, it would be a great waste of 
time. Here am I no farther than perhaps a third 
of my journey, and I have already admitted so much 
digression that my pilgrimage is like the story of 
a man asleep and dreaming, instead of the plain, 
honest, and straightforward narrative of fact. I 
will therefore postpone the Story of the Hungry 
Student till I get into the plains of Italy, or into 
the barren hills of that peninsula, or among the 
over-well-known towns of Tuscany, or in some 
other place where a little padding will do neither 
you nor me any great harm. 

On the other hand, do not imagine that I am 
going to give you any kind of description of this 
intolerable day's march. If you want some kind 
of visual concept (pretty word), take all these little 
chalets which were beginning and make what you 
can of them. 

Lector. Where are they ? 

Auctor. They are still in Switzerland ; not 
here. They were over-numerous as I maundered 
up from where at last the road leaves the valley 
and makes over a little pass for a place called 



198 STORY OF THE HORSE 

Schangnau. But though it is not a story, on the 
contrary, an exact incident and the truth — a thing 
that I would swear to in the court of justice, or 
quite willingly and cheerfully believe if another 
man told it to me, or even take as historical 
if I found it in a modern English history of the 
Anglo-Saxon Church — though, I repeat, it is a 
thing actually lived, yet I will tell it you. 

It was at the very end of the road, and when 
an enormous weariness had begun to add some 
kind of interest to this stuffless episode of the 
dull day, that a peasant with a brutal face, driving 
a cart very rapidly, came up with me. I said to 
him nothing, but he said to me some words in 
German which I did not understand. We were at 
that moment just opposite a little inn upon the 
right hand of the road, and the peasant began 
making signs to me to hold his horse for him 
while he went in and drank. 

How willing I was to do this you will not 
perhaps understand, unless you have that delicate 
and subtle pleasure in the holding of horses' heads, 
which is the boast and glory of some rare minds. 
And I was the more willing to do it from the fact 
that I have the habit of this kind of thing, acquired 
in the French manoeuvres, and had once held a 



STORY OF THE HORSE 199 

horse for no less a person than a General of 
Division, who gave me a franc for it, and this 
franc I spent later with the men of my battery, 
purchasing wine. So to make a long story short, 
as the publisher said when he published the popular 
edition of " Pamela," I held the horse for the 
peasant; always, of course, under the implicit 
understanding that he should allow me when he 
came out to have a drink, which I, of course, 
expected him to bring in his own hands. 

Far from it. I can understand the anger which 
some people feel against the Swiss when they travel 
in that country, though I will always hold that it 
is monstrous to come into a man's country of your 
own accord, and especially into a country so free 
and so well governed as is Switzerland, and then 
to quarrel with the particular type of citizen that 
you find there. 

Let us not discuss politics. The point is that 
the peasant sat in there drinking with his friends 
for a good three-quarters of an hour. Now and 
then a man would come out and look at the sky, 
and cough and spit and turn round again and say 
something to the people within in German, and go 
off; but no one paid the least attention to me as I 
held this horse. 



2oo STORY OF THE HORSE 

I was already in a very angry and irritable mood, 
for the horse was restive and smelt his stable, and 
wished to break away from me. And all angry 
and irritable as I was, I turned around to see if 
this man were coming to relieve me ; but I saw him 
laughing and joking with the people inside ; and 
they were all looking my way out of their window 
as they laughed. I may have been wrong, but I 
thought they were laughing at me. A man who 
knows the Swiss intimately, and who has written 
a book upon " The Drink Traffic : The Example 
of Switzerland," tells me they certainly were not 
laughing at me ; at any rate, I thought they 
were, and moved by a sudden anger I let go the 
reins, gave the horse a great clout, and set him off 
careering and galloping like a whirlwind down the 
road from which he had come, with the bit in his 
teeth and all the storms of heaven in his four feet. 
Instantly, as you may imagine, all the scoffers came 
tumbling out of the inn, hullabooling, gesticulating, 
and running like madmen after the horse, and one 
very old man even turned to protest to me. But 
I, setting my teeth, grasping my staff, and re- 
membering the purpose of my great journey, set 
on up the road again with my face towards Rome. 



QUALITY OF BOOKS 201 

I sincerely hope, trust, and pray that this part of 
my journey will not seem as dull to you as it did 
to me at the time, or as it does to me now while 
I write of it. But now I come to think of it, 
it cannot seem as dull, for I had to walk that 
wretched thirty miles or so all the day long, 
whereas you have not even to read it ; for I am 
not going to say anything more about it, but lead 
you straight to the end. 

Oh, blessed quality of books, that makes them 
a refuge from living ! For in a book everything 
can be made to fit in, all tedium can be skipped 
over, and the intense moments can be made time- 
less and eternal, and as a poet who is too little 
known has well said in one of his unpublished 
lyrics, we, by the art of writing — 

" Can fix the high elusive hour 
And stand in things divine." 

And as for high elusive hours, devil a bit of 
one was there all the way from Burgdorf to the 
Inn of the Bridge, except the ecstatic flash of joy 
when I sent that horse careering down the road 
with his bad master after him and all his gang 
shouting among the hollow hills. 

So. It was already evening. I was coming, 



202 THE UPPER EM MEN 

more tired than ever, to a kind of little pass by 
which my road would bring me back again to the 
Emmen, now nothing but a torrent. All the slope 
down the other side of the little pass (three or four 
hundred feet perhaps) was covered by a village, 
called, if I remember right, Schangnau, and there was 
a large school on my right and a great number of 
children there dancing round in a ring and singing 
songs. The sight so cheered me that I deter- 
mined to press on up the valley, though with no 
definite goal for the night. It was a foolish decision, 
for I was really in the heart of an unknown coun- 
try, at the end of roads, at the sources of rivers, 
beyond help. I knew that straight before me, not 
five miles away, was the Brienzer Grat, the huge 
high wall which it was my duty to cross right over 
from side to side. I did not know whether or 
not there was an inn between me and that vast 
barrier. 

The light was failing. I had perhaps some 
vague idea of sleeping out, but that would have 
killed me, for a heavy mist that covered all the tops 
of the hills and that made a roof over the valley, 
began to drop down a fine rain ; and, as thev sing 
in church on Christmas Eve, " the heavens sent 
down their dews upon a just man." But that was 



THE WOODEN TUN 203 

written in Palestine, where rain is a rare blessing ; 
there and then in the cold evening they would 
have done better to have warmed the righteous. 
There is no controlling them ; they mean well, 
but they bungle terribly. 

The road stopped being a road, and became like 
a Californian trail. I approached enormous gates in 
the hills, high, precipitous, and narrow. The mist 
rolled over them, hiding their summits and mak- 
ing them seem infinitely lifted up and reaching 
endlessly into the thick sky ; the straight, tenuous 
lines of the rain made them seem narrower still. 
Just as I neared them, hobbling, I met a man 
driving two cows, and said to him the word, 
" Guest-house ? " to which he said " Yaw ! " and 
pointed out a clump of trees to me just under the 
precipice and right in the gates I speak of. So I 
went there over an old bridge, and found a wooden 
house and went in. 

It was a house which one entered without cere- 
mony. The door was open, and one walked straight 
into a great room. There sat three men playing at 
cards. I saluted them loudly in French, English, 
and Latin, but they did not understand me, and 
what seemed really remarkable in an hotel (for it 
was an hotel rather than an inn), no one in the house 



2o 4 THE BRIENZER GRAT 

understood me — neither the servants nor any one; 
but the servants did not laugh at me as had the 
poor people near Burgdorf, they only stood round 
me looking at me patiently in wonder as cows do at 
trains. Then they brought me food, and as I did 
not know the names of the different kinds of food, 
I had to eat what they chose ; and the angel of that 
valley protected me from boiled mutton. I knew, 
however, the word Wein, which is the same in all 
languages, and so drank a quart of it consciously 
and of a set purpose. Then I slept, and next 
morning at dawn I rose up, put on my thin, wet 
linen clothes, and went downstairs. No one was 
about. I looked around for something to fill my 
sack. I picked up a great hunk of bread from 
the dining-room table, and went out shivering 
into the cold drizzle that was still falling from a 
shrouded sky. Before me, a great forbidding wall, 
growing blacker as it went upwards and ending 
in a level line of mist, stood the Brienzer Grat. 

To understand what I next had to do it is 
necessary to look back at the little map on page 192. 

You will observe that the straight way to Rome 
cuts the Lake of Brienz rather to the eastward of 
the middle, and then goes slap over Wetterhorn 
and strikes the Rhone Valley at a place called 



HOW IT LIES 205 

Ulrichen. That is how a bird would do it, if 
some High Pope of Birds lived in Rome and 
needed visiting, as, for instance, the Great Auk ; 
or if some old primal relic sacred to birds was 
connected therewith, as, for instance, the bones of 
the Dodo. . . . But I digress. The point is that the 
straight line takes one over the Brienzer Grat, over 
the lake, and then over the Wetterhorn. That was 
manifestly impossible. But whatever of it was 
possible had to be done, and among the possible 
things was clambering over the high ridge of the 
Brienzer Grat instead of going round like a coward 
by Interlaken. After I had clambered over it, how- 
ever, needs must I should have to take a pass called 
the Grimsel Pass and reach the Rhone Valley that 
way. It was with such a determination that I had 
come here to the upper waters of the Emmen, and 
stood now on a moist morning in the basin where 
that stream rises, at the foot of the mountain range 
that divided me from the lake. 

The Brienzer Grat is an extraordinary thing. It 
is quite straight ; its summits are, of course, of 
different heights, but from below they seem even, 
like a ridge : and, indeed, the whole mountain is 
more like a ridge than any other I have seen. At 
one end is a peak called the " Red Horn," the 



2o6 



THE BRIENZER GRAT 



other end falls suddenly above Interlaken, and 
wherever you should cut it you would get a section 
like this, for it is as steep as anything can be shori 




of sheer rock. There are no precipices on it, 
though there are nasty slabs quite high enough to 
kill a man — I saw several of three or four hundred 
feet. It is about five or six thousand feet high, 
and it stands right up and along the northern shore 
of the lake of Brienz. I began the ascent. 

Spongy meads, that soughed under the feet and 
grew steeper as one rose, took up the first few 
hundred feet. Little rivulets of mere dampness 
ran in among the under moss, and such very small 
hidden flowers as there were drooped with the surfeit 
of moisture. The rain was now indistinguishable 



THE FOG 207 

from a mist, and indeed I had come so near to 
the level belt of cloud, that already its gloom was 
exchanged for that diffused light which fills vapours 
from within and lends them their mystery. A 
belt of thick brushwood and low trees lay before 
me, clinging to the slope, and as I pushed with 
great difficulty and many turns to right and left 
through its tangle a wisp of cloud enveloped me, 
and from that time on I was now in, now out, 
of a deceptive drifting fog, in which it was most 
difficult to gauge one's progress. 

Now and then a higher mass of rock, a peak on 
the ridge, would show clear through a corridor of 
cloud and be hidden again ; also at times I would 
stand hesitating before a sharp wall or slab, and 
wait for a shifting of the fog to make sure of 
the best way round. I struck what might have 
been a loose path or perhaps only a gully ; lost it 
again and found it again. In one place I climbed 
up a jagged surface for fifty feet, only to find when 
it cleared that it was no part of the general ascent, 
but a mere obstacle which might have been out- 
flanked. At another time I stopped for a good 
quarter of an hour at an edge that might have been 
an indefinite fall of smooth rock, but that turned 
out to be a short drop, easy for a man, and not 



208 THE HALT IN THE: FOG 

much longer than my body. So I went upwards 
always, drenched and doubting, and not sure of the 
height I had reached at any time. 

At last I came to a place where a smooth stone 
lay between two pillared monoliths, as though it 
had been put there for a bench. Though all 
around me was dense mist, yet I could see above 
me the vague shape of a summit looming quite near. 
So I said to myself — 

" I will sit here and wait till it grows lighter 
and clearer, for I must now be within two or three 
hundred feet of the top of the ridge, and as any- 
thing at all may be on the other side, I had best go 
carefully and knowing my way." 

So I sat down facing the way I had to go and 
looking upwards, till perhaps a movement of the 
air might show me against a clear sky the line of 
the ridge, and so let me estimate the work that 
remained to do. I kept my eyes fixed on the point 
where I judged that sky-line to lie, lest I should 
miss some sudden gleam revealing it ; and as I sat 
there I grew mournful and began to consider the 
folly of climbing this great height on an empty 
stomach. The soldiers of the Republic fought 
their battles often before breakfast, but never, I 
think, without having drunk warm coffee, and no 



THE SUDDEN GULF 209 

one should attempt great efforts without some such 
refreshment before starting. Indeed, my fasting, 
and the rare thin air of the height, the chill and 
the dampness that had soaked my thin clothes 
through and through, quite lowered my blood and 
left it piano, whimpering and irresolute. I shivered 
and demanded the sun. 

Then I bethought me of the hunk of bread I had 
stolen, and pulling it out of my haversack I began 
to munch that ungrateful breakfast. It was hard 
and stale, and gave me little sustenance ; I still 
gazed upwards into the uniform meaningless light 
fog, looking for the ridge. 

Suddenly, with no warning to prepare the mind, 
a faint but distinct wind blew upon me, the mist 
rose in a wreath backward and upward, and I was 
looking through clear immensity, not at any ridge, 
but over an awful gulf at great white fields of 
death. The Alps were right upon me and before 
me, overwhelming and commanding empty down- 
ward distances of air. Between them and me was 
a narrow dreadful space of nothingness and silence, 
and a sheer mile below us both, a floor to that 
prodigious hollow, lay the little lake. 

My stone had not been a halting-place at all, but 
was itself the summit of the ridge, and those two 

14 



210 THE ALPS CLOSE BY 

rocks on either side of it framed a notch upon the 
very edge and sky-line of the high hills of Brienz. 

Surprise and wonder had not time to form in my 
spirit before both were swallowed up by fear. 
The proximity of that immense wall of cold, the 
Alps, seen thus full from the level of its middle 
height and comprehended as it cannot be from 
the depths ; its suggestion of something never 
changing throughout eternity — yet dead — was a 
threat to the eager mind. They, the vast Alps, 
all wrapped round in ice, frozen, and their im- 
mobility enhanced by the delicate, roaming veils 
which (as from an attraction) hovered in their 
hollows, seemed to halt the process of living. And 
the living soul whom they thus perturbed was sup- 
ported by no companionship. There were no trees 
or blades of grass around me, only the uneven 
and primal stones of that height. There were no 
birds in the gulf; there was no sound. And the 
whiteness of the glaciers, the blackness of the 
snow-streaked rocks beyond, was glistening and 
unsoftened. There had come something evil into 
their sublimity. I was afraid. 

Nor could I bear to look downwards. The slope 
was in no way a danger. A man could walk up 
it without often using his hands, and a man 



THE LIFE-QUALM 211 

could go down it slowly without any direct fall, 
though here and there he would have to turn 
round at each dip or step and hold with his hands 
and feel a little for his foothold. I suppose the 
general slope, down, down, to where the green 
began was not sixty degrees, but have you ever 
tried looking down five thousand feet at sixty 
degrees ? It drags the mind after it, and I could 
not bear to begin the descent. 

However I reasoned with myself. I said to my- 
self that a man should only be afraid of real 
dangers. That nightmare was not for the daylight. 
That there was now no mist but a warm sun. Then 
choosing a gully where water sometimes ran, but 
now dry, I warily began to descend, using my 
staff and leaning well backwards. 

There was this disturbing thing about the gully, 
that it went in steps, and before each step one saw 
the sky just a yard or two ahead : one lost the com- 
forting sight of earth. One knew of course that it 
would only be a little drop, and that the slope 
would begin again, but it disturbed one. And it is 
a trial to drop or clamber down, say fourteen or 
fifteen feet, sometimes twenty, and then to find no 
flat foothold but that eternal steep beginning again. 
And this outline in which I have somewhat, but 



212 



THE STEEP 




Alt,' 



not much, exaggerated the slope, will show what I 
mean. The dotted line is the line of vision just a? 
S ^~ one got to a " step.'' 
The little figure is 
Auctor. Lector is 
up in the air looking 
at him. Observe the 
perspective of the lake 
below, but make no 
comments. 

I went very slowly. 
When I was about half- 
way down and had 
come to a place where 
a shoulder of heaped 
rock stood on my left 
and where little parallel 
ledges led up to it, 
having grown accus- 
tomed to the descent 
and easier in my mind, 
I sat down on a slab 
y§ff and drew imperfectly 

v* the things I saw : the 

lake below me, the first forests clinging to the foot 
of the Alps beyond, their higher slopes of snow, 



4/1 M 

/ f.JPfi i ill 

/ I'lfm.* 

jf r J>RfJ F, f/f-VjcP 



4 




THE LAST DESCENT 



213 



and the clouds that had now 
begun to gather round them 
and that altogether hid the 4a|l 
last third of their enor- 
mous height. 

Then I saw 
steamer on the 
lake. I felt in 
touch with 
men. The 
slope grew 
easier. I 
snapped my 
fingers at the 
great devils I 
that haunt high 
mountains. I 
sniffed the gross and 
comfortable air of the 
lower valleys, I entered 
the belt of wood and was 
soon going quite a pace 
through the trees, for I had 
found a path, and was now able to 
sing. So I did. 

At last I saw through the trunks, 




2i 4 BRIENZ 

but a few hundred feet below me, the highroad that 
skirts the lake. I left the path and scrambled 
straight down to it. I came to a wall which I 
climbed, and found myself in somebody's garden. 
Crossing this and admiring its wealth and order (I 
was careful not to walk on the lawns), I opened a 
little private gate and came on to the road, and 
from there to Brienz was but a short way along a 
fine hard surface in a hot morning sun, with the 
gentle lake on my right hand not five yards away, 
and with delightful trees upon my left, caressing 
and sometimes even covering me with their shade. 
I was therefore dry, ready and contented when 
I entered by mid morning the curious town of 
Brienz, which is all one long street, and of which 
the population is Protestant. I say dry, ready and 
contented ; dry in my clothes, ready for food, con- 
tented with men and nature. But as I entered I 
squinted up that interminable slope, I saw the fog 
wreathing again along the ridge so infinitely above 
me, and I considered myself a fool to have crossed 
the Brienzer Grat without breakfast. But I could 
get no one in Brienz to agree with me, because no 
one thought I had done it, though several people 
there could talk French. 



BAD GEOGRAPHY 215 

The Grimsel Pass is the valley of the Aar ; it 
is also the eastern flank of that great massif* 
or bulk and mass of mountains called the Bernese 
Oberland. Western Switzerland, you must know, 
is not (as I first thought it was when I gazed 
down from the Weissenstein) a plain surrounded 
by a ring of mountains, but rather it is a 
plain in its northern half (the plain of the lower 
Aar), and in its southern half it is two enormous 
parallel lumps of mountains. I call them "lumps," 
because they are so very broad and tortuous in 
their plan that they are hardly ranges. Now these 
two lumps are the Bernese Oberland and the 
Pennine Alps, and between them runs a deep trench 
called the valley of the Rhone. Take Mont Blanc 
in the west and a peak called the Crystal Peak over 
the Val Bavona on the east, and they are the 
flanking bastions of one great wall, the Pennine 
Alps. Take the Diablerets on the west, and the 
Wetterhorn on the east, and they are the flanking 
bastions of another great wall, the Bernese Ober- 
land. And these two walls are parallel, with the 
Rhone in between. 

Now these two walls converge at a point where 
there is a sort of knot of mountain ridges, and 
this point may be taken as being on the boundary 



216 A DOUBTFUL MAP 

between Eastern and Western Switzerland. At this 
wonderful point the Ticino, the Rhone, the Aar, 
and the Reuss all begin, and it is here that the 
simple arrangement of the Alps to the west turns 
into the confused jumble of the Alps to the east. 

When you are high up on either wall you can 
catch the plan of all this, but to avoid a con- 
fused description and to help you to follow the 
marvellous, Hannibalian and never-before-attempted 
charge and march which I made, and which, alas ! 
ended only in a glorious defeat — to help you to 
picture faintly to yourselves the mirific and horri- 
pilant adventure whereby I nearly achieved super- 
human success in spite of all the powers of the 
air, I append a little map which is rough but clear 




\ 



MORE GEOGRAPHY 217 

and plain, and which I beg you to study closely, 
for it will make it easy for you to understand what 
next happened in my pilgrimage. 

The dark strips are the deep cloven valleys, the 
shaded belt is that higher land which is yet pass- 
able by any ordinary man. The part left white 
you may take to be the very high fields of ice and 
snow with great peaks which an ordinary man must 
regard as impassable, unless, indeed, he can wait 
for his weather and take guides and go on as a 
tourist instead of a pilgrim. 

You will observe that I have marked five clefts 
or valleys. A is that of the Aar, and the little 
white patch at the beginning is the lake of Brienz. 
B is that of the Reuss. C is that of the Rhone; 
and all these three are north of the great watershed 
or main chain, and all three are full of German- 
speaking people. 

On the other hand, D is the valley of the Toccia, 
E of the Maggia, and F of the Ticino. All these 
three are south of the great watershed, and are 
inhabited by Italian-speaking people. All these 
three lead down at last to Lake Major, and so to 
Milan and so to Rome. 

The straight line to Rome is marked on my 
map by a dotted line ending in an arrow, and you 



218 MORE AND MORE 

will see that it was just my luck that it should 
cross slap over that knot or tangle of ranges where 
all the rivers spring. The problem was how to 
negotiate a passage from the valley of the Aar to 
one of the three Italian valleys, without departing 
too far from my straight line. To explain my 
track I must give the names of all the high passes 
between the valleys. That between A and C is 
called the Grimsel ; that between B and C the 
Furka. That between D and C is the Gries Pass, 
that between F and C the Nufenen, and that between 
E and F is not the easy thing it looks on the map ; 
indeed it is hardly a pass at all but a scramble 
over very high peaks, and it is called the Crystalline 
Mountain. Finally, on the far right of my map, 
you see a high passage between B and F. This 
is the famous St. Gothard. 

The straight way of all was (i) over the Grimsel, 
then, the moment I got into the valley of the 
Rhone (2), up out of it again over the Nufenen, 
then the moment I was down into the valley of 
the 'Ticino (F), up out of it again (3) over the 
Crystalline into the valley of the Maggia (E). Once 
in the Maggia valley (the top of it is called the 
Val Bavona), it is a straight path for the lakes and 
Rome. There were also these advantages : that I 



AND MORE STILL 219 

should be in a place very rarely visited — all the 
guide-books are doubtful on it ; that I should be 
going quite straight; that I should be accom- 
plishing a feat, viz. the crossing of those high 
passes one after the other (and you must remember 
that over the Nufenen there is no road at all). 

But every one I asked told me that thus early in 
the year (it was not the middle of June) I could 
not hope to scramble over the Crystalline. No one 
(they said) could do it and live. It was all ice and 
snow and cold mist and verglas, and the precipices 
were smooth — a man would never get across ; so it 
was not worth while crossing the Nufenen Pass if 
I was to be balked at the Crystal, and I determined 
on the Gries Pass. I said to myself: " I will go on 
over the Grimsel, and once in the valley of the 
Rhone, I will walk a mile or two down to where the 
Gries Pass opens, and I will go over it into Italy." 
For the Gries Pass, though not quite in the straight 
line, had this advantage, that once over it you are 
really in Italy. In the Ticino valley or in the 
Val Bavona, though the people are as Italian as 
Catullus, yet politically they count as part of 
Switzerland ; and therefore if you enter Italy 
thereby, you are not suddenly introduced to that 
country, but, as it were, inoculated, and led on by 



220 THE GRIMSEL BEGINS 

degrees, which is a pity. For good things should 
come suddenly, like the demise of that wicked man, 
Mr. [deleted by the censor), who had oppressed the 
poor for some forty years, when he was shot dead 
from behind a hedge, and died in about the time it 
takes to boil an egg, and there was an end of him. 

Having made myself quite clear that I had a 
formed plan to go over the Grimsel by the new 
road, then up over the Gries, where there is no 
road at all, and so down into the vale of the 
Tosa, and having calculated that on the morrow I 
should be in Italy, I started out from Brienz after 
eating a great meal, it being then about midday, 
and I having already, as you know, crossed the 
Brienzer Grat since dawn. 

The task of that afternoon was more than I 
could properly undertake, nor did I fulfil it. From 
Brienz to the top of the Grimsel is, as the crow 
flies, quite twenty miles, and by the road a good 
twenty-seven. It is true I had only come from 
over the high hills ; perhaps six miles in a straight 
line. But what a six miles ! and all without food. 
Not certain, therefore, how much of the pass I 
could really do that day, but aiming at crossing it, 
like a fool, I went on up the first miles. 

For an hour or more after Brienz the road runs 



MEIRINGEN 221 

round the base of and then away from a fine great 
rock. There is here an alluvial plain like a con- 
tinuation of the lake, and the Aar runs through it, 
canalised and banked and straight, and at last the 
road also becomes straight. On either side rise 
gigantic cliffs enclosing the valley, and (on the day 
I passed there) going up into the clouds, which, 
though high, yet made a roof for the valley. From 
the great mountains on the left the noble rock 
jutted out alone and dominated the little plain ; 
on the right the buttresses of the main Alps all 
stood in a row, and between them went whorls of 
vapour high, high up — just above the places where 
snow still clung to the slopes. These whorls made 
the utmost steeps more and more misty, till at last 
they were lost in a kind of great darkness, in which 
the last and highest banks of ice seemed to be 
swallowed up. I often stopped to gaze straight 
above me, and I marvelled at the silence. 

It was the first part of the afternoon when I got 
to a place called Meiringen, and I thought that 
there I would eat and drink a little more. So I 
steered into the main street, but there I found such 
a yelling and roaring as I had never heard before, 
and very damnable it was ; as though men were 
determined to do common evil wherever God 



222 THE LOUD NOISE 

has given them a chance ot living in awe and 
worship. 

For they were all bawling and howling, with 
great placards and tickets, and saying, " This way 
to the Extraordinary Waterfall ; that way to the 
Strange Cave. Come with me and you shall see 
the never-to-be-forgotten Falls of the Aar," and so 
forth. So that my illusion of being alone in the 
roots of the world dropped off me very quickly, 
and I wondered how people could be so helpless 
and foolish as to travel about in Switzerland as 
tourists and meet with all this vulgarity and 
beastliness. 

If a man goes to drink good wine he does not 
say, " So that the wine be good I do not mind 
eating strong pepper and smelling hartshorn as I 
drink it," and if a man goes to read good verse, 
for instance, Jean Richepin, he does not say, " Go 
on playing on the trombone, go on banging the 
cymbals ; so long as I am reading good verse I am 
content." Yet men now go into the vast hills 
and sleep and live in their recesses, and pretend 
to be indifferent to all the touts and shouters 
and hurry and hotels and high prices and abomi- 
nations. Thank God, it goes in grooves ! I 
ly it again, thank God, the railways are trenches 



THE AAR 223 

that drain our modern marsh, for you have but to 
avoid railways, even by five miles, and you can get 
more peace than would fill a nosebag. All the 
world is my garden since they built railways, and 
gave me leave to keep off them. 

Also I vowed a franc to the Black Virgin of La 
Delivrande (next time I should be passing there) 
because I was delivered from being a tourist, and 
because all this horrible noise was not being dinned 
at me (who was a poor and dirty pilgrim, and no 
kind of prey for these cabmen, and busmen, and 
guides and couriers), but at a crowd of drawn, sad, 
jaded tourists that had come in by a train. 

Soon I had left them behind. The road climbed 
the first step upwards in the valley, going round a 
rock on the other side of which the Aar had cut 
itself a gorge and rushed in a fall and rapids. 
Then the road went on and on weary mile after 
weary mile, and I stuck to it, and it rose slowly all 
the time, and all the time the Aar went dashing 
by, roaring and filling the higher valley with echoes. 

I got beyond the villages. The light shining 
suffused through the upper mist began to be the 
light of evening. Rain, very fine and slight, began 
to fall. It was cold. There met and passed me, 
going down the road, a carriage with a hood up, 



224 THE INITIAL D 

driving at full speed. It could not be from over 
the pass, for I knew that it was nor yet open for 
carriages or carts. It was therefore from a hotel 
somewhere, and if there was a hotel I should rind 
it. I looked back to ask the distance, but they 
were beyond earshot, and so I went on. 

My boots in which I had sworn to walk to Rome 
were ruinous. Already since the Weissenstein they 
had gaped, and now the Brienzer Grat had made 
the sole of one of them quite free at the toe. It 
flapped as I walked. Very soon I should be walking 
on my uppers. I limped also, and I hated the wet 
cold rain. But I had to go on. Instead of flourish- 
ing my staff and singing, I leant on it painfully 
and thought of duty, and death, and dereliction, 
and every other horrible thing that begins with a D. 
I had to go on. If I had gone back there was 
nothing for miles. 

Before it was dark — indeed one could still read — 
I saw a group of houses beyond the Aar, and soon 
after I saw that my road would pass them, going 
over a bridge. When I reached them I went into 
the first, saying to myself, " I will eat, and if I can 
go no farther I will sleep here." 

There were in the house two women, one old, 
the other young ; and they were French-speaking, 



THE SNOW BLINK 225 

from the Vaud country. They had faces like 
Scotch people, and were very kindly, but odd, 
being Calvinist. I said, " Have you any beans?" 
They said, " Yes.". I suggested they should make 
me a dish of beans and bacon, and give me a bottle 
of wine, while I dried myself at their great stove. 
All this they readily did for me, and I eat heartily 
and drank heavily, and they begged me afterwards 
to stop the night and pay them for it ; but I was 
so set up by my food and wine that I excused 
myself and went out again and took the road. It 
was not yet dark. 

By some reflection from the fields of snow, 
which were now quite near at hand through 
the mist, the daylight lingered astonishingly late. 
The cold grew bitter as I went on through the 
gloaming. There were no trees save rare and stunted 
pines. The Aar was a shallow brawling torrent, 
thick with melting ice and snow and mud. Coarse 
grass grew on the rocks sparsely ; there were no 
flowers. The mist overhead was now quite near, 
and I still went on and steadily up through the half- 
light. It was as lonely as a calm at sea, except for 
the noise of the river. I had overworn myself, and 
that sustaining surface which hides from us in 
our health the abysses below the mind — I felt it 

15 



226 THE RICH HOTEL 

growing weak and thin. My fatigue bewildered 
me. The occasional steeps beside the road, one 
especially beneath a high bridge where a tributary 
falls into the Aar in a cascade, terrified me. They 
were like the emptiness of dreams. At last it being 
now dark, and I having long since entered the 
upper mist, or rather cloud (for I was now as high 
as the clouds), I saw a light gleaming through the 
fog, just off the road, through pine-trees. It was 
time. I could not have gone much farther. 

To this I turned and found there one of those 
new hotels, not very large, but very expensive. 
They knew me at once for what I was, and welcomed 
me with joy. They gave me hot rum and sugar, a 
fine warm bed, told me I was the first that had yet 
stopped there that year, and left me to sleep very 
deep and yet in pain, as men sleep who are stunned. 
But twice that night I woke suddenly, staring at 
darkness. I had outworn the physical network upon 
which the soul depends, and I was full of terrors. 

Next morning I had line coffee and bread and 
butter and the rest, like a rich man ; in a gilded 
dining-room all set out for the rich, and served by a 
fellow that bowed and scraped. Also they made 
me pay a great deal, and kept their eyes off my 



HEAD OF THE PASS 227 

boots, and were still courteous to me, and I to 
them. Then I bought wine of them — the first wine 
not of the country that I had drunk on this march, 
a Burgundy — and putting it in my haversack with 
a nice white roll, left them to wait for the next 
man whom the hills might send them. 

The clouds, the mist, were denser than ever in 
that early morning ; one could only see the imme- 
diate road. The cold was very great ; my clothes 
were not quite dried, but my heart was high, and I 
pushed along well enough, though stiffly, till I came 
to what they call the Hospice, which was once a 
monk-house, I suppose, but is now an inn. I had 
brandy there, and on going out I found that it stood 
at the foot of a sharp ridge which was the true 
Grimsel Pass, the neck which joins the Bernese 
Oberland to the eastern group of high mountains. 
This ridge or neck was steep like a pitched roof 
— very high I found it, and all of black glassy 
rock, with here and there snow in sharp, even, 
sloping sheets just holding to it. I could see but 
little of it at a time on account of the mist. 

Hitherto for all these miles the Aar had been 
my companion, and the road, though rising always, 
had risen evenly and not steeply. Now the Aar 
was left behind in the icy glen where it rises, and 



228 THE LAKE OF THE DEAD 

the road went in an artificial and carefully built set 
of zig-zags up the face of the cliff. There is a short 
cut, but I could not find it in the mist. It is the 
old mule-path. Here and there, however, it was 
possible to cut off long corners by scrambling over 
the steep black rock and smooth ice, and all the 
while the cold, soft mist wisped in and out around 
me. After a thousand feet of this I came to the 
top of the Grimsel, but not before I had passed 
a place where an avalanche had destroyed the 
road and where planks were laid. Also before one 
got to the very summit, no short cuts or climb- 
ing were possible. The road ran deep in a cutting 
like a Devonshire lane. Only here the high banks 
were solid snow. 

Some little way past the summit, on the first 
zig-zag down, I passed the Lake of the Dead in 
its mournful hollow. The mist still enveloped 
all the ridge-side, and moved like a press of 
spirits over the frozen water, then — as suddenly 
as on the much lower Brienzer Grat, and (as on 
the Brienzer Grat) to the southward and the sun, 
the clouds lifted and wreathed up backward and 
were gone, and where there had just been fulness 
was only an immensity of empty air and a sudden 
sight of clear hills beyond and of little strange 



COMMENT 



229 



distant things thousands and thousands of feet 
below. 

Lector. Pray are we to have any more of that 
fine writing ? 

Auctor. I saw there as in a cup things that I 
had thought (when I first studied the map at home) 
far too spacious and spread apart to go into the 
view. Yet here they were all quite contained and 
close together, on so vast a scale was the whole 
place conceived. It was the comb of mountains 
of which I have written ; the meeting of all the 
valleys. 

There, from the height of a steep bank, as it 
were (but a bank many thousands of feet high), 
one looked down into a whole district or little 
world. On the map, I say, it had seemed so great 
that I had thought one would command but this 
or that portion of it ; as it was, one saw it all. 

And this is a peculiar thing I have noticed in all 
mountains, and have never been able to understand — 
namely, that if you draw a plan or section to scale, 
your mountain does not seem a very important 
thing. One should not, in theory, be able to 
dominate from its height, nor to feel the world 
small below one. nor to hold a whole countryside 



23° 



DIGRESSION 



in one's hand — yet one does. The mountains from 
their heights reveal to us two truths. They sud- 
denly make us feel our insignificance, and at the 
same time they free the immortal Mind, and let it 
feel its greatness, and they release it from the earth. 
But I say again, in theory, when one considers the 
exact relation of their height to the distances one 
views from them, they ought to claim no such 
effect, and that they can produce that effect is 
related to another thing — the way in which they 
exaggerate their own steepness. 

For instance, those noble hills, my downs in 
Sussex, when you are upon them overlooking the 
weald, from Chanctonbury say, feel like this — 



Oo> urn 



C£A*c*«**«-*to 




but in reality they are like this — 



•fcoxH,!*. 



"ttt Vca iot 



C^o.'nctontiuty 



or even lower. Indeed, it is impossible to give 
them truly, so insignificant are they ; if the stretch 
of the Weald were made nearly a yard long, 
Chanctonbury would not, in proportion, be more 



INTERLUDE 



231 



than a fifth of an inch high ! And yet, from the 
top of Chanctonbury, how one seems to overlook 
it and possess it all ! 

Well, so it was here from the Grimsel when I 
overlooked the springs of the Rhone. In true pro- 
portion the valley I gazed into and over must have 
been somewhat like this — 




It felt for all the world as deep and utterly below 
me as this other — 




Moreover, where there was no mist, the air was 
so surprisingly clear that I could see everything 
clean and sharp wherever I turned my eyes. The 
mountains forbade any very far horizons to the 
view, and all that I could see was as neat and 
vivid as those coloured photographs they sell with 



232 A STILL RICHER HOTEL 

bright green grass and bright white snow, and blue 
glaciers like precious stones. 

I scrambled down the mountain, for here, on the 
south side of the pass, there was no snow or ice, 
and it was quite easy to leave the road and take the 
old path cutting off the zig-zags. As the air got 
heavier, I became hungry, and at the very end of my 
descent, two hundred feet or so above the young 
Rhone, I saw a great hotel. I went round to their 
front door and asked them whether I could eat, 
and at what price. " Four francs," they said. 

" What ! " said I, " four francs for a meal ! Come, 
let me eat in the kitchen, and charge me one." But 
they became rude and obstinate, being used only to 
deal with rich people, so I cursed them, and went 
down the road. But I was very hungry. 

The road falls quite steeply, and the Rhone, 
which it accompanies in that valley, leaps in little 
falls. On a bridge I passed a sad Englishman 
reading a book, and a little lower down, two 
American women in a carriage, and after that a 
priest (it was lucky I did not see him first. Any- 
how, I touched iron at once, to wit, a key in my 
pocket), and after that a child minding a goat. 
Altogether, I felt myself in the world again, and 
as I was on a good road, all down hill, I thought 



THE SECOND GOOD WOMAN 233 

myself capable of pushing on to the next village. 
But my hunger was really excessive, my right boot 
almost gone, and my left boot nothing to exhibit 
or boast of, when I came to a point where at last 
one looked down the Rhone valley for miles. It is 
like a straight trench, and at intervals there are 
little villages, built of most filthy chalets, the said 
chalets raised on great stones. There are pine-trees 
up, up on either slope, into the clouds, and beyond 
the clouds I could not see. I left on my left a 
village called " Between the Waters." I passed 
through another called " Ehringen," but it has no 
inn. At last, two miles farther, faint from lack 
of food, I got into Ulrichen, a village a little 
larger than the rest, and the place where I believed 
one should start to go either over the Gries or 
Nufenen Pass. In Ulrichen was a warm, wooden, 
deep-eaved, frousty, comfortable, ramshackle, dark, 
anyhow kind of a little inn called " The Bear." 
And entering, I saw one of the women whom God 
loves. 

She was of middle age, very honest and simple 
in the face, kindly and good. She was messing 
about with cooking and stuff, and she came up to 
me stooping a little, her eyes wide and innocent, 
and a great spoon in her hand. Her face was 



a 3 4 ON THE MANIA 

extremely broad and flat, and I had never seen eyes 
set so far apart. Her whole gait, manner, and 
accent proved her to be extremely good, and on 
the straight road to heaven. I saluted her in the 
French tongue. She answered me in the same, but 
very broken and rustic, for her natural speech was a 
kind of mountain German. She spoke very slowly, 
and had a nice soft voice, and she did what only 
good people do, I mean, looked you in the eyes as 
she spoke to you. 

Beware of shifty-eyed people. It is not only 
nervousness, it is also a kind of wickedness. Such 
people come to no good. I have three of them 
now in my mind as I write. One is a Professor. 

And, by the way, would you like to know why 
universities suffer from this curse of nervous dis- 
ease ? Why the greatest personages stammer or 
have St. Vitus' dance, or jabber at the lips, or hop 
in their walk, or have their heads screwed round, or 
tremble in the fingers, or go through life with great 
goggles like a motor car ? Eh ? I will tell you. 
It is the punishment of their intellectual pride ', than 
which no sin is more offensive to the angels. 

What ! here are we with the jolly world of God 
all round us, able to sing, to draw, to paint, to 



OF UNIVERSITIES 235 

hammer and build, to sail, to ride horses, to run, 
to leap ; having for our splendid inheritance love 
in youth and memory in old age, and we are to 
take one miserable little faculty, our one-legged, 
knock-kneed, gimcrack, purblind, rough-skinned, 
underfed, and perpetually irritated and grumpy 
intellect, or analytical curiosity rather (a diseased 
appetite), and let it swell till it eats up every other 
function ? Away with such foolery. 

Lector. When shall we get on to . . . 

Auctor. Wait a moment. I say, away with 
such foolery. Note that pedants lose all propor- 
tion. They never can keep sane in a discussion. 
They will go wild on matters they are wholly un- 
able to judge, such as Armenian Religion or the 
Politics of Paris or what not. Never do they use 
one of those three phrases which keep a man 
steady and balance his mind, I mean the words (1) 
After all it is not my business. (2) Tut ! tut ! You 
dont say sol and (3) Credo in Unum Deum Patrem 
Omnipotentem, Factorem omnium visibilium atque in- 
visibilium ; in which last there is a power of syn- 
thesis that can jam all their analytical dust-heap into 
such a fine, tight, and compact body as would make 
them stare to see. I understand that they need 
six months' holiday a year. Had I my way they 



236 THE FRIGHTFUL SPICE 

should take twelve, and an extra day on leap 
years. 

Lector. Pray, pray return to the woman at 
the inn. 

Auctor. I will, and by this road : to say that 
on the day of Judgment, when St. Michael weighs 
souls in his scales, and the wicked are led off by 
the Devil with a great rope, as you may see them 
over the main porch of Notre Dame (I will heave a 
stone after them myself I hope), all the souls of the 
pedants together will not weigh as heavy and sound 
as the one soul of this good woman at the inn. 

She put food before me and wine. The wine 
was good, but in the food was some fearful herb or 
other I had never tasted before — a pure spice or 
scent, and a nasty one. One could taste nothing else, 
and it was revolting; but I ate it for her sake. 

Then, very much refreshed, I rose, seized my 
great staff, shook myself and said, " Now it is 
about noon, and I am off for the frontier." 

At this she made a most fearful clamour, saying 
that it was madness, and imploring me not to think 
of it, and running out fetched from the stable a 
tall, sad, pale-eyed man who saluted me profoundly 
and told me that he knew more of the mountains 



THE IMPASSABLE HILLS 237 

than any one for miles. And this by asking many 
afterwards I found out to be true. He said that 
he had crossed the Nufenen and the Gries when- 
ever they could be crossed since he was a child, 
and that if I attempted it that day I should sleep 
that night in Paradise. The clouds on the moun- 
tain, the soft snow recently fallen, the rain that 
now occupied the valleys, the glacier on the Gries, 
and the pathless snow in the mist on the Nufenen 
would make it sheer suicide for him, an experienced 
guide, and for me a worse madness. Also he spoke 
of my boots and wondered at my poor cotton coat 
and trousers, and threatened me with intolerable 
cold. 

It seems that the books I had read at home, when 
they said that the Nufenen had no snow on it, spoke 
of a later season of the year ; it was all snow now, 
and soft snow, and hidden by a full mist in such a day 
from the first third of the ascent. As for the Gries, 
there was a glacier on the top which needed some 
kind of clearness in the weather. Hearing all this 
I said I would remain — but it was with a heavy 
heart. Already I felt a shadow of defeat over me. 
The loss of time was a thorn. I was already short 
of cash, and my next money was at Milan. My 
return to England was fixed for a certain date, and 



238 THE SCHOOL-BOOKS 

stronger than either of these motives against dela* 
was a burning restlessness that always takes men 
when they are on the way to great adventures. 

I made him promise to wake me next morning at 
three o'clock, and, short of a tempest, to try and 
get me across the Gries. As for the Nufenen and 
Crystalline passes which I had desired to attempt, 
and which were (as I have said) the straight line to 
Rome, he said (and he was right), that let alone the 
impassability of the Nufenen just then, to climb the 
Crystal Mountain in that season would be as easy 
as flying to the moon. Now, to cross the Nufenen 
alone, would simply land me in the upper valley of 
the Ticino, and take me a great bend out of my 
way by Bellinzona. Hence my bargain that at least 
he should show me over the Gries Pass, and this he 
said, if man could do it, he would do the next day ; 
and I, sending my boots to be cobbled (and thereby 
breaking another vow), crept up to bed, and all 
afternoon read the school-books of the children. 
They were in French, from lower down the valley, 
and very Genevese and heretical for so devout a 
household. But the Genevese civilisation is the 
standard for these people, and they combat the 
Calvinism of it with missions, and have statues in 
their rooms, not to speak of holy water stoups. 



THE START 239 

The rain beat on my window, the clouds came 
lower still down the mountain. Then (as is finely 
written in the Song of Roland), " the day passed and 
the night came, and I slept." But with the coming 
of the small hours, and with my waking, prepare 
yourselves for the most extraordinary and terrible ad- 
venture that befel me out of all the marvels and perils 
of this pilgrimage, the most momentous and the 
most worthy of perpetual record, I think, of all that 
has ever happened since the beginning of the world. 

At three o'clock the guide knocked at my door, 
and I rose and came out to him. We drank coffee 
and ate bread. We put into our sacks ham and 
bread, and he white wine and I brandy. Then we 
set out. The rain had dropped to a drizzle, and 
there was no wind. The sky was obscured for the 
most part, but here and there was a star. The hills 
hung awfully above us in the night as we crossed 
the spongy valley. A little wooden bridge took us 
over the young Rhone, here only a stream, and we 
followed a path up into the tributary ravine which 
leads to the Nufenen and the Gries. In a mile or 
two it was a little lighter, and this was as well, for 
some weeks before a great avalanche had fallen, and 
we had to cross it gingerly. Beneath the wide cap 



240 THE FINAL HOLLOW 

of frozen snow ran a torrent roaring. I remembered 
Colorado, and how I had crossed the Arkansaw 
on such a bridge as a boy. We went on in the 
uneasy dawn. The woods began to show, and 
there was a cross where a man had slipped from 
above that very April and been killed. Then, 
most ominous and disturbing, the drizzle changed 
to a rain, and the guide shook his head and said it 
would be snowing higher up. We went on, and 
it grew lighter. Before it was really day (or else the 
weather confused and darkened the sky), we crossed 
a good bridge, built long ago, and we halted at a 
shed where the cattle lie in the late summer when 
the snow is melted. There we rested a moment. 

But on leaving its shelter we noticed many dis- 
quieting things. The place was a hollow, the end 
of the ravine — a bowl, as it were; one way out of 
which is the Nufenen, and the other the Gries. 

Here it is in a sketch 
map. The heights are 
marked lighter and lighter, 
from black in the valleys 
to white in the impassable 
mountains. E is where we 
stood, in a great cup or basin, having just come up 
the ravine B. C is the Italian valley of the Tosa, 




DOUBT 241 

and the neck between it and E is the Gries. D is 
the valley of the Ticino, and the neck between E 
and it is the Nufenen. A is the Crystal Mountain. 
You may take the necks or passes to be about 
8000, and the mountains 10,000 or 11,000 feet 
above the sea. 

We noticed, I say, many disquieting things. 
First, all that bowl or cup below the passes was a 
carpet of snow, save where patches of black water 
showed, and all the passes and mountains, from 
top to bottom, were covered with very thick snow ; 
the deep surface of it soft and fresh fallen. 
Secondly, the rain had turned into snow. It was 
falling thickly all around. Nowhere have I more 
perceived the immediate presence of great Death. 
Thirdly, it was far colder, and we felt the beginning 
of a wind. Fourthly, the clouds had come quite 
low down. 

The guide said it could not be done, but I said we 

must attempt it. I was eager, and had not yet felt 

the awful grip of the cold. We left the Nufenen 

on our left, a hopeless steep of new snow buried 

in fog, and we attacked the Gries. For half-an- 

hour we plunged on through snow above our 

knees, and my thin cotton clothes were soaked. 

So far the guide knew we were more or less 

16 



242 



ALL SNOW 



on the path, and he went on and I panted after 
him. Neither of us spoke, hut occasionally he 



■■■BHB^BBBHiBBBHBBBHBHKBSnBESmi^B 





looked back to make sure I had not dropped 
out. 

The snow began to fall more thickly, and the 
wind had risen somewhat. I was afraid of another 
protest from the guide, but he stuck to it well, 
and I after him, continually plunging through 



THE TOURMENTE 243 

soft snow and making yard after yard upwards. 
The snow fell more thickly and the wind still rose. 
We came to a place which is, in the warm season, 
an alp ; that is, a slope of grass, very steep but not 
terrifying ; having here and there sharp little pre- 
cipices of rock breaking it into steps, but by no 
means (in summer) a matter to make one draw back. 
Now, however, when everything was still Arctic 
it was a very different matter. A sheer steep of 
snow whose downward plunge ran into the driving 
storm and was lost, whose head was lost in the 
same mass of thick cloud above, a slope somewhat 
hollowed and bent inwards, had to be crossed 
if we were to go any farther ; and I was terrified, 
for I knew nothing of climbing. The guide said 
there was little danger, only if one slipped one 
might slide down to safety, or one might (much 
less probably) get over rocks and be killed. I 
was chattering a little with cold ; but as he 
did not propose a return, I followed him. The 
surface was alternately slabs of frozen snow and 
patches of soft new snow. In the first he cut 
steps, in the second we plunged, and once I went 
right in and a mass of snow broke off beneath me 
and went careering down the slope. He showed 
me how to hold my staff backwards as he did 



2 4 4 THE GUIDE DESPAIRS 

his alpenstock, and use it as a kind of brake in 
case I slipped. 

We had been about twenty minutes crawling over 
that wall of snow and ice ; and it was more and 
more apparent that we were in for danger. Before 
we had quite reached the far side, the wind was 
blowing a very full gale and roared past our 
ears. The surface snow was whirring furiously 
like dust before it : past our faces and against 
them drove the snow-flakes, cutting the air : not 
falling, but making straight darts and streaks. 
They seemed like the form of the whistling wind ; 
they blinded us. The rocks on the far side of 
the slope, rocks which had been our goal when 
we set out to cross it, had long ago disap- 
peared in the increasing rush of the blizzard. Sud- 
denly as we were still painfully moving on, stooping 
against the mad wind, these rocks loomed up over 
as large as houses, and we saw them through the 
swarming snow-flakes as great hulls are seen through 
a fog at sea. The guide crouched under the lee of 
the nearest ; I came up close to him and he put his 
hands to my ear and shouted to me that nothing 
further could be done — he had so to shout because 
in among the rocks the hurricane made a roaring 
sound, swamping the voice. 



HIS DILEMMA 245 

I asked how far we were from the summit. He 
said he did not know where we were exactly, but 
that we could not be more than 800 feet from 
it. I was but that from Italy and I would not 
admit defeat. I offered him all I had in money to 
go on, but it was folly in me, because if I had had 
enough to tempt him and if he had yielded we should 
both have died. Luckily it was but a little sum. 
He shook his head. He would not go on, he broke 
out, for all the money there was in the world. He 
shouted me to eat and drink, and so we both did. 

Then I understood his wisdom, for in a little 
while the cold began to seize me in my thin clothes. 
My hands were numb, my face already gave me in- 
tolerable pain, and my legs suffered and felt heavy. 
I learnt another thing (which had I been used to 
mountains I should have known), that it was not 
a simple thing to return. The guide was hesi- 
tating whether to stay in this rough shelter, or to 
face the chances of the descent. This terror had 
not crossed my mind, and I thought as little of it 
as I could, needing my courage, and being near to 
breaking down from the intensity of the cold. 

It seems that in a tourmente (for by that excellent 
name do the mountain people call such a storm) 
it is always a matter of doubt whether to halt or to 



246 DEFEAT 

go back. If you go back through it and lose your 
way, you are done for. If you halt in sonic shelter, 
it may go on for two or three days, and then there 
is an end of you. 

After a little he decided for a return, but he told 
me honestly what the chances were, and my suffering 
from cold mercifully mitigated my fear. But even 
in that moment, I felt in a confused but very con- 
scious way that I was defeated. I had crossed so 
many great hills and rivers, and pressed so well on 
my undeviating arrow-line to Rome, and I had 
charged this one great barrier manfully where the 
straight path of my pilgrimage crossed the Alps — 
and I had failed ! Even in that fearful cold I 
felt it, and it ran through my doubt of return like 
another and deeper current of pain. Italy was there, 
just above, right to my hand. A lifting of a cloud, 
a little respite, and every downward step would have 
been towards the sunlight. As it was, I was being 
driven back northward, in retreat and ashamed. 
The Alps had conquered me. 

Let us always after this combat their immensity 
and their will, and always hate the inhuman guards 
that hold the gates of Italy, and the powers that lie 
in wait for men on those high places. But now I 
know that Italy will always stand apart. She is cut 



THE RETREAT 247 

off by no ordinary wall, and Death has all his army 
on her frontiers. 

Well, we returned. Twice the guide rubbed 
my hands with brandy, and once I had to halt 
and recover for a moment, failing and losing 
my hold. Believe it or not, the deep footsteps 
of our ascent were already quite lost and covered 
by the new snow since our halt, and even had 
they been visible, the guide would not have re- 
traced them. He did what I did not at first 
understand, but what I soon saw to be wise. He 
took a steep slant downward over the face of the 
snow-slope, and though such a pitch of descent 
a little unnerved me, it was well in the end. For 
when we had gone down perhaps 900 feet, or a 
thousand, in perpendicular distance, even I, half 
numb and fainting, could feel that the storm was 
less violent. Another two hundred, and the flakes 
could be seen not driving in flashes past, but sepa- 
rately falling. Then in some few minutes we could 
see the slope for a very long way downwards quite 
clearly ; then, soon after, we saw far below us the 
place where the mountain-side merged easily into 
the plain of that cup or basin whence we had 
started. 

When we saw this, the guide said to me, " Hold 



248 WE REACH OUR BASK 

your stick thus, if you are strong enough, and let 
yourself slide." I could just hold it, in spite of the 
cold. Life was returning to me with intolerable 
pain. We shot down the slope almost as quickly 
as falling, but it was evidently safe to do so, as the 
end was clearly visible, and had no break or rock 
in it. 

So we reached the plain below, and entered the 
little shed, and thence looking up, we saw the storm 
above us ; but no one could have told it for what it 
was. Here, below, was silence, and the terror and 
raging above seemed only a great trembling cloud 
occupying the mountain. Then we set our faces 
down the ravine by which we had come up, and so 
came down to where the snow changed to rain. 
When we got right down into the valley of the 
Rhone, we found it all roofed with cloud, and the 
higher trees were white with snow, making a line 
like a tide mark on the slopes of the hills. 

I re-entered " The Bear," silent and angered, 
and not accepting the humiliation of that failure. 
Then, having eaten, I determined in equal silence 
to take the road like any other fool ; to cross the 
Furka by a fine highroad, like any tourist, and to 
cross the St. Gothard by another fine highroad, as 
millions had done before me, and not to look heaven 



THE COMMON ROAD 249 

in the face again till I was back after my long 
detour, on the straight road again for Rome. 

But to think of it ! I who had all that planned 
out, and had so nearly done it ! I who had 
cut a path across Europe like a shaft, and seen so 
many strange places ! — now to have to recite all the 
litany of the vulgar; Bellinzona, Lugano, and this 
and that, which any railway travelling fellow can 
tell you. Not till Como should I feel a man 
again. . . . 

Indeed it is a bitter thing to have to give up 
one's sword. 

I had not the money to wait ; my defeat had 
lowered me in purse as well as in heart. I started 
off to enter by the ordinary gates — not Italy even, 
but a half-Italy, the canton of the Ticino. It was 
very hard. 

This book is not a tragedy, and I will not write 
at any length of such pain. That same day, in the 
latter half of it, I went sullenly over the Furka ; 
exactly as easy a thing as going up St. James' 
Street and down Piccadilly. I found the same storm 
on its summit, but on a highroad it was a different 
affair. I took no short cuts. I drank at all the 
inns — at the base, half-way up, near the top, and 



250 THE SULLEN HOURS 

at the top. I told them, as the snow beat past, 
how I had attacked and all but conquered the 
Gries that wild morning, and they took me for a 
liar; so I became silent even within my own mind. 
I looked sullenly at the white ground all the 
way. And when on the far side I had got low 
enough to be rid of the snow and wind and to 
be in the dripping rain again, I welcomed the 
rain, and let it soothe like a sodden friend my 
sodden uncongenial mind. 

I will not write of Hospenthal. It has an old 
tower, and the road to it is straight and hideous. 
Much I cared for the old tower ! The people of 
the inn (which I chose at random) cannot have 
loved me much. 

I will not write of the St. Gothard. Get it 
out of a guide-book. I rose when I felt inclined ; 
I was delighted to find it still raining. A dense 
mist above the rain gave me still greater pleasure. 
I had started quite at my leisure late in the day, 
and I did the thing stolidly, and my heart was like 
a dully-heated mass of coal or iron because I was 
acknowledging defeat. You who have never taken 
a straight line and held it, nor seen strange men 
and remote places, you do not know what it is 
to have to go round by the common way. 



ITALY! 251 

Only in the afternoon, and on those little 
zig-zags which are sharper than any other in the 
Alps (perhaps the road is older), something 
changed. 

A warm air stirred the dense mist which had 
mercifully cut me off from anything but the mere 
road and from the contemplation of hackneyed 
sights. 

A hint or memory of gracious things ran in the 
slight breeze, the wreaths of fog would lift a little 
for a few yards, and in their clearings I thought 
to approach a softer and more desirable world. I 
was soothed as though with caresses, and when I 
began to see somewhat farther and felt a vigour 
and fulness in the outline of the Trees, I said to 
myself suddenly — 

" I know what it is ! It is the South, and a great 
part of my blood. They may call it Switzerland 
still, but I know now that I am in Italy, and this is 
the gate of Italy lying in groves." 

Then and on till evening I reconciled myself with 
misfortune, and when I heard again at Airolo the 
speech of civilised men, and saw the strong Latin 
eyes and straight forms of the Race after all those 
days of fog and frost and German speech and the 
north, my eyes filled with tears and 1 was as 



2 S 2 THE AIROLANS 

glad as a man come home again, and I could have 
kissed the ground. 

The wine of Airolo and its songs, how greatly 
they refreshed me ! To see men with answering 
eyes and to find a salute returned ; the noise of 
careless mouths talking all together ; the group 
at cards, and the laughter that is proper to man- 
kind ; the straight carriage of the women, and 
in all the people something erect and noble as 
though indeed they possessed the earth. I made 
a meal there, talking to all my companions left 
and right in a new speech of my own, which was 
made up, as it were, of the essence of all the Latin 
tongues, saying — 

" Ha ! Si jo a traversa li montagna no erat facile ! 
Nenni ! II san Gottardo ? Nil est ! pooh ! poco ! 
Ma hesterna jo ha voulu traversar in Val Bavona, e 
credi non ritornar^ nam /redo, /redo erat in alto ! La 
tourmente ma prise. ..." 

And so forth, explaining all fully with gestures, 
exaggerating, emphasising, and acting the whole 
matter, so that they understood me without much 
error. But I found it more difficult to under- 
stand them, because they had a regular formed 
language with terminations and special words. 



It went to 
a thought was 
in me of which 
you shall soon 
hear more. 
My money 
was running 
low, and the 
chief anxiety 
of a civilised 
man was 
spreadingover 
my mind like 
the shadow of 
a cloud over a 
field of corn 
in summer. 
They gave me 
a number of 
"good-nights," 
and at parting 
I could not 
forbear from 
boasting that I 
was a pilgrim 
on my way to 



THE RIFT 253 

my heart to offer them no wine, but 







Rome. This they repeated one to 



254 THE NEW WORLD 

another, and one man told me that the next good 
halting-place was a town called Faido, three hours 
down the road. He held up three fingers to explain, 
and that was the last intercourse I had with the 
Airolans, for at once I took the road. 

I glanced up the dark ravine which I should 
have descended had I crossed the Nufenen. I 
thought of the Val Bavona, only just over the 
great wall that held the west; and in one place 
where a rift (you have just seen its picture) led 
up to the summits of the hills I was half tempted 
to go back to Airolo and sleep and next morning 
to attempt a crossing. But I had accepted my 
fate on the Gries and the falling road also held 
me, and so I continued my way. 

Everything was pleasing in this new valley under 
the sunlight that still came strongly from behind 
the enormous mountains; everything also was new, 
and I was evidently now in a country of a special 
kind. The slopes were populous, I had come to 
the great mother of fruits and men, and I was 
-soon to see her cities and her old walls, and the 
rivers that glide bv them. Church towers also 
repeated the same shapes up and up the wooded 
hills until the villages stopped at the line of the 
higher slopes and at the patches of snow. The 



THE MANY CHURCHES 



2 S5 




>J 



houses were square and coloured ; they were graced 

with arbours, and there seemed to be all around 

nothing but what 

was reasonable 

and secure, and 

especially no rich 

or poor. 

I noticed all 
these things on 
the one side and 
the other till, not 
two hours from 
Airolo, I came 
to a step in the 
valley. For the 
valley of the 
Ticino is made 
up of distinct 
levels, each of 
which might 
have held a lake once for the way it is en- 
closed ; and each level ends in high rocks with 
a gorge between them. Down this gorge the 
river tumbles in falls and rapids and the road 
picks its way down steeply, all banked and cut, 
and sometimes has to cross from side to side by 









256 



FAIDO 



a bridge, while the railway above one overcomes 
the sharp descent by running round into the heart 

of the hills through 
circular tunnels and 
coming out again tar 
below the cavern 
where it plunged in. 
Then when all three 
— the river, the road, 
and the railway — 
have got over the 
great step, a new 
level of the valley 
opens. This is the 
way the road comes 
into the south, and 
as I passed down to 
the lower valley, 
though it was dark- 
ening into evening, 
something melted 
out of the mountain 
air, there was content and warmth in the growing 
things, and I found it was a place for vineyards. 
So, before it was yet dark, I came into Faido, 
and there I slept, having at last, after so many 




THE FILMS OF MORNING 257 

adventures, crossed the threshold and occupied 
Italy. 

Next day before sunrise I set out, and all the 
valley was adorned and tremulous with the films 
of morning. 

Now all of you who have hitherto followed the 
story of this great journey, put out of your minds 
the Alps and the passes and the snows — postpone 
even for a moment the influence of the happy 
dawn and of that South into which I had entered, 
and consider only this truth, that I found myself 
just out of Faido on this blessed date of God with 
eight francs and forty centimes for my viaticum 
and temporal provision wherewith to accomplish 
the good work of my pilgrimage. 

Now when you consider that coffee and bread 
was twopence and a penny for the maid, you may 
say without lying that I had left behind me the 
escarpment of the Alps and stood upon the down- 
ward slopes of the first Italian stream and at the 
summit of the entry road with eight francs ten 
centimes in my pocket — my body hearty and my 
spirit light, for the arriving sun shot glory into 
the sky. The air was keen, and a fresh day came 
radiant over the high eastern walls of the valley. 

17 



258 8 FRANCS 10 CENTIMES 

And what of that? Why, one might make 
many things of it. For instance, eight francs and 
ten centimes is a very good day's wages ; it is a lot 
to spend in cab fares but little for a coupe. It is a 
heavy price for Burgundy but a song for Tokay. 
It is eighty miles third-class and more ; it is thirty 
or less first-class ; it is a flash in a train de luxe, 
and a mere fleabite as a bribe to a journalist. It 
would be enormous to give it to an apostle beg- 
ging at a church door, but nothing to spend on 
luncheon. 

Properly spent I can imagine it saving five or 
six souls, but I cannot believe that so paltry a sum 
would damn half an one. 

Then, again, it would be a nice thing to sing 
about. Thus, if one were a modern fool one 
might write a dirge with " Huit francs et dix 
centimes " all chanted on one low sad note, and 
coming in between brackets for a " motif," and with 
a lot about autumn and Death — which last, Death 
that is, people nowadays seem to regard as some- 
thing odd, whereas it is well known to be the com- 
monest thing in the world. Or one might make 
the words the backbone of a triolet, only one would 
have to split them up to fit it into the metre ; or 
one might make it the decisive line in a sonnet ; 



SONGS 



259 



or one might make a pretty little lyric of it, to the 
tune of" Madame la Marquise" — 




E j i j Tij |J-l|Tt ife 



Viyact 

" Huit francs et dix centimes, 
Tra la la, la la la." 

Or one might put it rhetorically, fiercely, stoically, 
finely, republicanly into the Heroics of the Great 
School. Thus — 

" Hernani (with indignation) .... dans ces efforts sublimes 

* Qu'avez vous a offrir? ' 
Ruy Blas (simply). Huit francs et dix centimes/" 

Or finally (for this kind of thing cannot go on 
for ever), one might curl one's hair and dye it 
black, and cock a dirty slouch hat over one ear 
and take a guitar and sit on a flat stone by the 
roadside and cross one's legs, and, after a few pings 
and pongs on the strings, strike up a Ballad with 
the refrain — 



^fr i'^ ^m 



3= 

" Car fai toujour s huit francs et dix centimes ! " 

a jocular, a sub-sardonic, a triumphant refrain ! 



160 FORCED MARCHES 

But all this is by the way; the point is, win 
was the eight francs and ten centimes of such 
importance just there and then ? 

For this reason, that I could get no more money 
before Milan ; and I think a little reflection will 
show you what a meaning lies in that phrase. 
Milan was nearer ninety than eighty miles off. By 
the strict road it was over ninety. And so I was 
forced to consider and to be anxious, for how 
would this money hold out? 

There was nothing for it but forced marches, 
and little prospect of luxuries. But could it be 
done ? 

I thought it could, and I reasoned this way. 

" It is true I need a good deal of food, and 
that if a man is to cover great distances he must 
keep fit. It is also true that many men have done 
more on less. On the other hand, they were men 
who were not pressed for time — I am ; and I do 
not know the habits of the country. Ninety miles 
is three good days ; two very heavy days. Indeed, 
whether it can be done at all in two is doubtful. 
But it can be done in two days, two nights, and 
half the third day. So if I plan it thus I shall 
achieve it ; namely, to march say forty-five miles 



STORY OF THE OLD SAILOR 261 

or more to-day, and to sleep rough at the end of 
it. My food may cost me altogether three francs. 
I march the next day twenty-five to thirty, my 
food costing me another three francs. Then with 
the remaining two francs and ten centimes I will take 
a bed at the end of the day, and coffee and bread 
next morning, and will march the remaining twenty 
miles or less (as they may be) into Milan with a 
copper or two in my pocket. Then in Milan, 
having obtained my money, I will eat." 

So I planned with very careful and exact 
precision, but many accidents and unexpected 
things, diverting my plans, lay in wait for me 
among the hills. 

And to cut a long story short, as the old sailor 
said to the young fool 

Lector. What did the old sailor say to the 
young fool ? 

Auctor. Why, the old sailor was teaching the 
young fool his compass, and he said — 

" Here we go from north, making round by 
west, and then by south round by east again to 
north. There are thirty-two points of the compass, 
namely, first these four, N., W., S., and E., and 
these are halved, making four more, viz., NW., 



262 STORY OF THE OLD SAILOR 

SW., SE., and NE. I trust I make myself clear," 
said the old sailor. 

" That makes eight divisions, as we call them. 
So look smart and follow. Each of these eight is 
divided into two symbolically and symmetrically 
divided parts, as is most evident in the nomenclature 
of the same," said the old sailor. " Thus between 
N. and NE. is NNE., between NE. and E. is 
ENE., between E. and SE. is . . ." 

" I see," said the young fool. 

The old sailor, frowning at him, continued — 

" Smart you there. Heels together, and note you 
well. Each of these sixteen divisions is separated 
quite reasonably and precisely into two. Thus 
between N. and NNE. we get N. by E.," said the 
old sailor; "and between NNE. and NE. we get 
NE. by E., and between NE. and ENE. we get 
NE. by E.," said the old sailor; "and between 
ENE. and E. we get E. by N., and then between 
E. and ESE. we get . . ." 

But here he noticed something dangerous in the 
young fool's eyes, and having read all his life 
Admiral Griles' " Notes on Discipline," and know- 
ing that discipline is a subtle bond depending 
" not on force but on an attitude of the mind," he 
continued — 



LONG STORY CUT SHORT 263 

" And so to cut a long story short we come 
round to the north again." Then he added, " It 
is customary also to divide each of these points 
into quarters. Thus NNE. f E. signifies . . ." 

But at this point the young fool, whose hands 
were clasped behind him and concealed a marlin- 
spike, up and killed the old sailor, and so rounded 
off this fascinating tale. 

Well then, to cut a long story short, I had to 
make forced marches. With eight francs and ten 
centimes, and nearer ninety than eighty-five miles 
before the next relief, it was necessary to plan and 
then to urge on heroically. Said I to myself, " The 
thing can be done quite easily. What is ninety 
miles ? Two long days ! Who cannot live on four 
francs a day ? Why, lots of men do it on two 
francs a day." 

But my guardian angel said to me, "You are an 
ass ! Ninety miles is a great deal more than twice 
forty-five. Besides which " (said he) "a great effort 
needs largeness and ease. Men who live on two 
francs a day or less are not men who attempt to 
march forty-five miles a day. Indeed, my friend, 
you are pushing it very close." 

" Well," thought I, " at least in such a glorious 



264 BODIO 

air, with such Hills all about one, and such a race, 
one can come to no great harm." 

But I knew within me that Latins are hard where 
money is concerned, and I feared for my strength. 
I was determined to push forward and to live on 
little. I filled my lungs and put on the spirit of an 
attempt and swung down the valley. 

Alas ! I may not linger on that charge, for if I 
did I should not give you any measure of its deter- 
mination and rapidity. Many little places passed 
me off the road on the flanks of that valley, and 
mostly to the left. While the morning was yet 
young, I came to the packed little town of Bodio, 
and passed the eight franc limit by taking coffee, 
brandy, and bread. There also were a gentleman 
and a lady in a carriage who wondered where I was 
going, and I told them (in French) " to Rome." 
It was nine in the morning when I came to Biasca. 
The sun was glorious, and not yet warm : it was 
too early for a meal. They gave me a little cold 
meat and bread and wine, and seven francs stood 
out dry above the falling tide of my money. 

Here at Biasca the valley took on a different 
aspect. It became wider and more of a country- 
side ; the vast hills, receding, took on an appearance 



THE ENCLOSED VALLEY 265 

of less familiar majesty, and because the trend of the 
Ticino turned southerly some miles ahead the whole 
place seemed enclosed from the world. One would 
have said that a high mountain before me closed it 
in and rendered it unique and unknown, had not a 
wide cleft in the east argued another pass over the 
hills, and reminded me that there were various 
routes over the crest of the Alps. 

Indeed, this hackneyed approach to Italy which 
I had dreaded and despised and accepted only after 
a defeat was very marvellous, and this valley of the 
Ticino ought to stand apart and be a commonwealth 
of its own like Andorra or the Gresivaudan : the 
noble garden of the Isere within the first gates of 
the Dauphine. 

I was fatigued, and my senses lost acuteness. 
Still I noticed with delight the new character of the 
miles I pursued. A low hill just before me, jutting 
out apparently from the high western mountains, 
forbade me to see beyond it. The plain was allu- 
vial, while copses and wood and many cultivated 
fields now found room where, higher up, had been 
nothing but the bed of a torrent with bare banks 
and strips of grass immediately above them ; it was 
a place worthy of a special name and of being one 
lordship and a countryside. Still 1 went on towards 



266 LAKE MAJOR 

that near boundary of the mountain spur and 
towards the point where the river rounded it, the 
great barrier hill before me still seeming to shut in 
the valley. 

It was noon, or thereabouts, the heat was increas- 
ing (I did not feel it greatly, for I had eaten and 
drunk next to nothing), when, coming round the 
point, there opened out before me the great fan 
of the lower valley and the widening and fruitful 
plain through which the Ticino rolls in a full river 
to reach Lake Major, which is its sea. 

Weary as I was, the vision of this sudden expan- 
sion roused me and made me forget everything 
except the sight before me. The valley turned 
well southward as it broadened. The Alps spread 
out on either side like great arms welcoming the 
southern day ; the wholesome and familiar haze 
that should accompany summer dimmed the more 
distant mountains of the lakes and turned them 
amethystine, and something of repose and of dis- 
tance was added to the landscape ; something I had 
not seen for many days. There was room in that 
air and space for dreams and for many living men, 
for towns perhaps on the slopes, for the boats of 
happy men upon the waters, and everywhere for 
crowded and contented living. History might be 



BELLINZONA 



267 




in all this, and I remembered it was the entry and 

introduction of many armies. Singing therefore 

a song of Charlemagne, I swung on in a good 

effort to where, right under the sun, what seemed 

a wall and two towers on a _ 

sharp little hillock set in the „ j,| EftM^.v 

« III I J ^^ \\^. 
bosom of the valley showed Ul^'l.Ju !' Ink 

D ... ' ,. . iL^^di' 1 • 'Am 

me Belhnzona. Within the L-^M| 

central street of that city, j^pn 

and on its shaded side, I 



boasted that I had covered 
in that morning my twenty- 
five miles. 



The woman of the place 
came out to greet me, and 
asked me a question. I did 
not catch it (for it was in a 
foreign language), but guess- 
ing her to mean that I should 
take something, I asked for 
vermouth, and seeing before me a strange door 
built of red stone, I drew it as I sipped my glass 



268 4 FRANCS 80 CENTIMES 

and the woman talked to me all the while in a 
language I could not understand. And as I drew 
I became so interested that I forgot my poverty 
and offered her husband a glass, and then gave 
another to a lounging man that had watched me 
at work, and so from less than seven francs my 
money fell to six exactly, and my pencil fell from 
my hand, and I became afraid. 

" I have done a foolish thing," said I to myself, 
" and have endangered the success of my endea- 
vour. Nevertheless, that cannot now be remedied, 
and I must eat ; and as eating is best where one 
has friends, I will ask a meal of this woman." 

Now had they understood French I could have 
bargained and chosen ; as it was I had to take what 
they were taking, and so I sat with them as they 
all came out and ate together at the little table. 
They had soup and flesh, wine and bread, and 
as we ate we talked, not understanding each other, 
and laughing heartily at our mutual ignorance. 
And they charged me a franc, which brought my 
six francs down to five. But I, knowing my subtle 
duty to the world, put down twopence more, as I 
would have done anywhere else, for a pour boire ; and 
so with four francs and eighty centimes left, and 
with much less than a third of my task accomplished 



THE PROUD STATIONER 269 

I rose, now drowsy with the food and wine, and 
saluting them, took the road once more. 

But as I left Bellinzona there was a task before 
me which was to bring my poverty to the test ; for 
you must know that my map was a bad one, and on 
a very small scale, and the road from Bellinzona to 
Lugano has a crook in it, and it was essential to find 
a short cut. So I thought to myself, " I will try 
to see a good map as cheaply as possible," and I 
slunk off to the right into a kind of main square, 
and there I found a proud stationer's shop, such as 
would deal with rich men only, or tourists of the 
coarser and less humble kind. I entered with some 
assurance, and said in French — 

" Sir, I wish to know the hills between here and 
Lugano, but I am too poor to buy a map. If you 
will let me look at one for a few moments, I will 
pay you what you think fit." 

The wicked stationer became like a devil for 
pride, and glaring at me, said — 

" Look ! Look for yourself. I do not take 
pence. I sell maps ; I do not hire them ! " 

Then I thought, " Shall I take a favour from 
such a man ? " But I yielded, and did. I went 
up to the wall and studied a large map for some 
moments. Then as I left, I said to him — 



270 



HIS TRANSFORMATION 



"Sir, I shall always hold in remembrance the day 
on which you did me this signal kindness ; nor shall 
I forget your courtesy and goodwill." 
And what do you think he did at that ? 
Why, he burst into twenty smiles, and bowed, 
and seemed beatified, and said : " Whatever I can 
do for my customers and for visitors to this town, 
I shall always be delighted to do. Pray, sir, will 
you not look at other maps for a moment ? " 

Now, why did he say this and grin happily like 
a gargoyle appeased ? Did something in my accent 
suggest wealth? or was he naturally kindly ? I do 
not know ; but of this I am sure, one should never 
hate human beings merely on a first, nor on a tenth, 
impression. Who knows? This map-seller of Bel- 
linzona may have been a good man ; anyhow, I left 
him as rich as I found him, and remembering that 
the true key to a forced march is to break the 

twenty-four hours into 
three pieces, and now 
feeling the extreme 
heat, I went out along 
the burning straight 
road until I found a 
border of grass and a hedge, and there, in spite 
of the dust and the continually passing carts, I lay 




THE AFTERNOON 271 

at full length in the shade and fell into the sleep 
of men against whom there is no reckoning. Just 
as I forgot the world I heard a clock strike two. 

I slept for two hours beneath that hedge, and 
when I awoke the air was no longer a trembling 
furnace, but everything about me was wrapped 
round as in a cloak of southern afternoon, and was 
still. The sun had fallen midway, and shone in 
steady glory through a haze that overhung Lake 
Major, and the wide luxuriant estuary of the vale. 
There lay before me a long straight road for miles 
at the base of high hills ; then, far off, this road 
seemed to end at the foot of a mountain called, I 
believe, Ash Mount or Cinder Hill. But my im- 
perfect map told me that here it went sharp round 
to the left, choosing a pass, and then at an angle 
went down its way to Lugano. 

Now Lugano was not fifteen miles as the crow 
flies from where I stood, and I determined to cut 
off that angle by climbing the high hills just above 
me. They were wooded only on their slopes; their 
crest and much of their sides were a down-land of 
parched grass, with rocks appearing here and there. 
At the first divergent lane I made off eastward 
from the road and began to climb. 



272 



THE ITALIAN LAKES 



In under the chestnut trees the lane became a 
number of vague beaten paths ; I followed straight 
upwards. Here and there were little houses stand- 
ing hidden in leaves, 
and soon I crossed the 
railway, and at last 
above the trees I saw 
the sight of all the 
Bellinzona valley to 
the north ; and turn- 
ing my eyes I saw it 
broaden out between 
its walls to where the 
lake lay very bright, 
in spite of the slight mist, and this mist gave the 
lake distances, and the mountains round about it 
were transfigured and seemed part of the mere 
light. 




The Italian lakes have that in them and their air 
which removes them from common living. Their 
beauty is not the beauty which each of us sees for 
himself in the world ; it is rather the beauty of 
a special creation ; the expression of some mind. 
To eyes innocent, and first freshly noting our great 
temporal inheritance — I mean to the eyes of a boy 



A SERMON 



273 



and girl just entered upon the estate of this glorious 
earth, and thinking themselves immortal, this shrine 




of Europe might remain for ever in the memory ; an 
enchanted experience, in which the single sense of 
sight had almost touched the boundary of music. 
They would remember these lakes as the central 
emotion of their youth. To mean men also who, 
in spite of years and of a full foreknowledge of 
death, yet attempt nothing but the satisfaction of 
sense, and pride themselves upon the taste and fine- 
ness with which they achieve this satisfaction, the 

Italian lakes would seem a place for habitation, and 

is 



274 END OF THE SERMON 

there such a man might build his house contentedly. 
But to ordinary Christians I am sure there is some- 
thing unnatural in this beauty of theirs, and they 
find in it either a paradise only to be won by a much 
longer road or a bait and veil of sorcery, behind 
which lies great peril. Now, for all we know, 
beauty beyond the world may not really bear this 
double aspect ; but to us on earth — if we are 
ordinary men — beauty of this kind has something 
evil. Have you not read in books how men when 
they see even divine visions are terrified ? So as 
I looked at Lake Major in its halo I also was afraid, 
and I was glad to cross the ridge and crest of the 
hill and to shut out that picture framed all round 
with glory. 

But on the other side of the hill I found, to my 
great disgust, not, as I had hoped, a fine slope down 
leading to Lugano, but a second interior valley and 
another range just opposite me. I had not the 
patience to climb this, so I followed down the 
marshy land at the foot of it, passed round the 
end of the hill and came upon the railway, which 
had tunnelled under the range I had crossed. 1 
followed the railway for a little while and at last 
crossed it, penetrated through a thick brushwood, 



THE HOUSE OF THE GODS 275 

forded a nasty little stream, and found myself again 
on the main road, wishing heartily I had never 
left it. 

It was still at least seven miles to Lugano, and 
though all the way was downhill, yet fatigue threat- 
ened me. These short cuts over marshy land and 
through difficult thickets are not short cuts at all, 
and I was just wondering whether, although it was 
already evening, I dared not rest a while, when there 
appeared at a turn in the road a little pink house 
with a yard all shaded over by a vast tree; there 
was also a trellis making a roof over a plain bench 
and table, and on the trellis grew vines. 

"Into such houses," I thought, " the gods walk 
when they come down and talk with men, and such 
houses are the scenes of adventures. I will go in 
and rest." 

So I walked straight into the courtyard and found 
there a shrivelled brown-faced man with kindly eyes, 
who was singing a song to himself. He could talk 
a little French, a little English, and his own Italian 
language. He had been to America and to Paris ; 
he was full of memories ; and when I had listened 
to these and asked for food and drink, and said I 
was extremely poor and would have to bargain, he 
made a kind of litany of " I will not cheat you ; I 



2/6 THE DISHONEST MAN 

am an honest man; I also am poor," and so forth. 
Nevertheless I argued about every item — the bread, 
the sausage, and the beer. Seeing that I was in 
necessity, he charged me about three times their 
value, but I beat him down to double, and lower 
than that he would not go. Then we sat down 
together at the table and ate and drank and talked 
of far countries ; and he would interject remarks 
on his honesty compared with the wickedness of 
his neighbours, and I parried with illustrations of 
my poverty and need, pulling out the four francs 
odd that remained to me, and jingling them sorrow- 
fully in my hand. " With these," I said, " I must 
reach Milan." 

Then I left him, and as I went down the road 
a slight breeze came on, and brought with it the 
coolness of evening. 

At last the falling plateau reached an edge, many 
little lights glittered below me, and I sat on a stone 
and looked down at the town of Lugano. 

It was nearly dark. The mountains all around 
had lost their mouldings, and were marked in flat 
silhouettes against the sky. The new lake which had 
just appeared below me was bright as water is at 
dusk, and far away in the north and east the high 
Alps still stood up and received the large glow of 



THE HONEST MAN 277 

evening. Everything else was full of the coming 
night, and a few stars shone. Up from the town 
came the distant noise of music ; otherwise there 
was no sound. 

I could have rested there a long time, letting my 
tired body lapse into the advancing darkness, and 
catching in my spirit the inspiration of the silence — 
had it not been for hunger. I knew by experience 
that when it is very late one cannot be served in the 
eating-houses of poor men, and I had not the money 
for any other. So I rose and shambled down the 
steep road into the town, and there I found a square 
with arcades, and in the south-eastern corner of this 
square just such a little tavern as I required. Enter- 
ing, therefore, and taking off my hat very low, I 
said in French to a man who was sitting there with 
friends, and who was the master, " Sir, what is the 
least price at which you can give me a meal ? " 

He said, " What do you want? " 

I answered, " Soup, meat, vegetables, bread, and a 
little wine." 

He counted on his fingers, while all his friends 
stared respectfully at him and me. He then gave 
orders, and a very young and beautiful girl set be- 
fore me as excellent a meal as I had eaten for days 
on days, and he charged me but a franc and a half. 



278 I SLEEP 

He gave me also coffee and a little cheese, and I, feel- 
ing hearty, gave threepence over for the service, and 
they all very genially wished me a good-night ; but 
their wishes were of no value to me, for the night 
was terrible. 

I had gone over forty miles ; how much over 
I did not know. I should have slept at Lugano, 
but my lightening purse forbade me. I thought, " I 
will push on and on ; after all, I have already slept, 
and so broken the back of the day. I will push on 
till I am at the end of my tether, then I will find a 
wood and sleep." Within four miles my strength 
abandoned me. I was not even so far down the 
lake as to have lost the sound of the band at 
Lugano floating up the still water, when I was 
under an imperative necessity for repose. It was 
perhaps ten o'clock, and the sky was open and 
glorious with stars. I climbed up a bank on my 
right, and searching for a place to lie found one 
under a tree near a great telegraph pole. Here was 
a little parched grass, and one could lie there and 
see the lake and wait for sleep. It was a bene- 
diction to stretch out all supported by the dry 
earth, with my little side-bag for pillow, and to look 
at the clear night above the hills, and to listen to the 
very distant music, and to wonder whether or not, in 



THE UNDER-WORLD 279 

this strange southern country, there might not be 
snakes gliding about in the undergrowth. Caught 
in such a skein of influence I was soothed and fell 
asleep. 

For a little while I slept dreamlessly. 

Just so much of my living self remained as can 
know, without understanding, the air around. It is 
the life of trees. That under-part, the barely con- 
scious base of nature which trees and sleeping men 
are sunk in, is not only dominated by an immeasur- 
able calm, but is also beyond all expression contented. 
And in its very stuff there is a complete and change- 
less joy. This is surely what the great mind meant 
when it said to the Athenian judges that death must 
not be dreaded since no experience in life was so 
pleasurable as a deep sleep ; for being wise and 
seeing the intercommunion of things, he could 
not mean extinction, which is nonsense, but a 
lapse into that under-part of which I speak. For 
there are gods also below the earth. 

But a dream came into my sleep and disturbed 
me ; increasing life, and therefore bringing pain. I 
dreamt that I was arguing, at first easily, then 
violently, with another man. More and more he 
pressed me, and at last in my dream there were 



280 THE DREAM 

clearly spoken words, and he said to me, " You 
must be wrong, because you are so cold ; if you 
were right you would not be so cold." And this 
argument seemed quite reasonable to me in my 
foolish dream, and I muttered to him, " You are 
right. I must be in the wrong. It is very cold 
. . ." Then I half opened my eyes and saw the 
telegraph pole, the trees, and the lake. Far up the 
lakej where the Italian Frontier cuts it, the torpedo- 
boats, looking for smugglers, were casting their 
search-lights. One of the roving beams fell full on 
me and I became broad awake. I stood up. It was 
indeed cold, with a kind of clinging and grasping 
chill that was not to be expressed in degrees of heat, 
but in dampness perhaps, or perhaps in some 
subtler influence of the air. 

I sat on the bank and gazed at the lake in 
some despair. Certainly I could not sleep again 
without a covering cloth, and it was now past mid- 
night, nor did I know of any house, whether if I 
took the road I should find one in a mile, or in 
two, or in five. And, note you, I was utterly 
exhausted. That enormous march from Faido, 
though it had been wisely broken by the siesta 
at Bellinzona, needed more than a few cold hours 
under trees, and I thought of the three poor francs 



THE HOUSE IN THE NIGHT 281 

in my pocket, and of the thirty-eight miles remain- 
ing to Milan. 

The stars were beyond the middle of their slow 
turning, and I watched them, splendid and in order, 
for sympathy, as I also regularly, but slowly and 
painfully, dragged myself along my appointed road. 
But in a very short time a great, tall, square, white 
house stood right on the roadway, and to my intense 
joy I saw a light in one of its higher windows. 
Standing therefore beneath, I cried at the top of my 
voice, " Hola ! " five or six times. A woman put 
her head out of the window into the fresh night, 
and said, " You cannot sleep here ; we have no 
rooms," then she remained looking out of her 
window and ready to analyse the difficulties of the 
moment ; a good-natured woman and fat. 

In a moment another window at the same level, 
but farther from me, opened, and a man leaned out, 
just as those alternate figures come in and out of 
the toys that tell the weather. " It is impossible," 
said the man ; " we have no rooms." 

Then they talked a great deal together, while I 
shouted, " Quid vis ? Non e possibile dormire in 
la foresta I e troppo fredo ! Vis ne me assassinare ? 
Veni de Lugano — e piu — non e possibile ritornare I " 
and so forth. 



282 THE POPE'S PICTURE 

They answered in strophe and antistrophe, some- 
times together in full chorus, and again in semi- 
chorus, and with variations, that it was impossible. 
Then a light showed in the chinks of their great 
door ; the lock grated, and it opened. A third 
person, a tall youth, stood in the hall. I went 
forward into the breach and occupied the hall. 
He blinked at me above a candle, and murmured, 
as a man apologising, " It is not possible." 

Whatever I have in common with these southern- 
ers made me understand that I had won, so I smiled 
at him and nodded ; he also smiled, and at once 
beckoned to me. He led me upstairs, and showed 
me a charming bed in a clean room, where there 
was a portrait of the Pope, looking cunning ; the 
charge for that delightful and human place was 
sixpence, and as I said good-night to the youth, the 
man and woman from above said good-night also. 
And this was- my first introduction to the most 
permanent feature in the Italian character. The 
good people ! 

When I woke and rose I was the first to be up 
and out. It was high morning. The sun was not 
yet quite over the eastern mountains, but I had 
slept, though so shortly yet at great ease, and the 



THE WAGGON-BOATS 283 

world seemed new and full of a merry mind. The 
sky was coloured like that high metal work which 
you may see in the studios of Paris ; there was gold 
in it fading into bronze, and above, the bronze 
softened to silver. A little morning breeze, 
courageous and steady, blew down the lake and 
provoked the water to glad ripples, and there was 
nothing that did not move and take pleasure in 
the day. 

The Lake of Lugano is of a complicated shape, 
and has many arms. It is at this point very narrow 
indeed, and shallow too ; a mole, pierced at either 
end with low arches, has here been thrown across it, 
and by this mole the railway and the road pass over 
to the eastern shore. I turned in this long cause- 
way and noticed the northern _ — 



view. On the farther shore *^ 

-' ft 
was an old village and some /f* . 

pleasure-houses of rich men ff k \&%;'J' 

on the shore ; the boats also k$y< 




were beginning to go about *- 

the water. These boats were 

strange, unlike other boats ; "^ 

they were covered with hoods, v~-v'' 

and looked like floating waggons. This was to 

shield the rowers from the sun. Far off a man 



284 



THE COURTYARD 




was sailing with a little brown sprit-sail. It was 
morning, and all the world was alive. 

Coffee in the village left me two francs and two 
pennies. I still thought the thing could be done, so 
invigorating and deceiving are the early hours, and 

coming farther 
down the road to 
an old and beauti- 
ful courtyard on 
the left, I drew 
it, and hearing a 
bell at hand I saw 
a tumble - down 
church with trees 
before it, and went 
in to Mass; and 
though it was a 
little low village 
Mass,yetthepriest 
had three acolytes 
to serve it, and 
|k-l (true and gracious 
mark of a Catholic 
country !) these boys were restless and distracted at 
their office. 







THE ORACLE 285 

You may think it trivial, but it was certainly a 
portent. One of the acolytes had half his head 
clean shaved ! A most extraordinary sight ! I 
could not take my eyes from it, and I heartily 
wished I had an Omen-book with me to tell me 
what it might mean. 

When there were oracles on earth, before Pan 
died, this sight would have been of the utmost use. 
For I should have consulted the oracle woman for 
a Lira — at Biasca for instance, or in the lonely 
woods of the Cinder Mountain ; and, after a lot of 
incense and hesitation, and wrestling with the god, 
the oracle would have accepted Apollo and, staring 
like one entranced, she would have chanted verses 
which, though ambiguous, would at least have been 
a guide. Thus : — 

Matutinus adest ubi Vesper, et accipiens te 
Saepe recusatum voces intelligit bospes 
Rusticus ignotas not as, ac jlumina tellus 

Occupat In sane to turn, turn, stans Aede caveto 

Tonsuram Hirsuti Capitis, via namque pedestrem 
Ferrea praeveniens cursum, peregrine, laborem 
Pro pie tat e tua inceptum frustratur, amore 
Antiqui Ritus alto sub Num'ine Romae. 

Lector. What Hoggish great Participles ! 
Auctor. Well, well, you see it was but a rustic 
oracle at ojd. the revelation, and even that is sup- 



286 THE ENGLISH OK IT 

posing silver at par. Let us translate it for the 
vulgar : — 

When early morning seems but eve 
And they that still refuse receive : 
When speech unknown men understand ; 
And floods are crossed upon dry land. 
Within the Sacred Walls beware 
The Shaven Head that boasts of Hair, 
For when the road attains the rail 
The Pilgrim' s great attempt shall fail. 

Of course such an oracle might very easily have 
made me fear too much. The " shaven head " I 
should have taken for a priest, especially if it was 
to be met with " in a temple " — it might have pre- 
vented me entering a church, which would have 
been deplorable. Then I might have taken it 
to mean that I should never have reached Rome, 
which would have been a monstrous weight upon 
my mind. Still, as things unfolded themselves, 
the oracle would have become plainer and plainer, 
and I felt the lack of it greatly. For, I repeat, I 
had certainly received an omen. 

The road now neared the end of the lake, and 
the town called Capo di Lago, or " Lake-head," lay 
off to my right. I saw also that in a very little 
while I should abruptly find the plains. A low hilJ 



ITALY! (AGAIN) 287 

some five miles ahead of me was the last roll of the 
mountains, and just above me stood the last high 
crest, a precipitous peak of bare rock, up which 
there ran a cog-railway to some hotel or other. I 
passed through an old town under the now rising 
heat; I passed a cemetery in the Italian manner, with 
marble figures like common living men. The road 
turned to the left, and I was fairly on the shoulder 
of the last glacis. I stood on the Alps at their 
last southern bank, and before me was Lombardy. 

Also in this ending of the Swiss canton one was 
more evidently in Italy than ever. A village 
perched upon a rock, deep woods and a ravine 
below it, its houses and its church, all betrayed 
the full Italian spirit. 

The frontier town was Chiasso. I hesitated with 
reverence before touching the sacred soil which I 
had taken so long to reach, and I longed to be able 
to drink its health ; but though I had gone, I sup- 
pose, ten miles, and though the heat was increasing, 
I would not stop ; for I remembered the two 
francs, and my former certitude of reaching Milan 
was shaking and crumbling. The great heat of 
midday would soon be on me, I had yet nearly 
thirty miles to go, and my bad night began to 
oppress me. 



288 COMO 

I crossed the frontier, which is here an imaginary 
line. Two slovenly customs-house men asked me 
if I had anything dutiable on me. I said No, and 
it was evident enough, for in my little sack or 
pocket was nothing but a piece of bread. If they 
had applied the American test, and searched me for 
money, then indeed they could have turned me 
back, and I should have been forced to go into the 
fields a quarter of a mile or so and come into their 
country by a path instead of a highroad. 

This necessity was spared me. I climbed slowly 
up the long slope that hides Como, then I came 
down upon that lovely city and saw its frame of 
hills and its lake below me. 

These things are not like things seen by the 
eyes. I say it again, they are like what one feels 
when music is played. 

I entered Como between ten and eleven faint 
for food, and then a new interest came to fill my 
mind with memories of this great adventure. The 
lake was in flood, and all the town was water. 

Como dry must be interesting enough ; Como 
flooded is a marvel. What else is Venice? And 
here is a Venice at the foot of high mountains, and 
all in the water, no streets or squares ; a fine even 



THE RICH AND THE POOR 289 

depth of three feet and a half or so for navigators, 
much what you have in the Spitway in London 
River at low spring tides. 

There were a few boats about, but the traffic and 
pleasure of Como was passing along planks laid on 
trestles over the water here and there like bridges ; 
and for those who were in haste, and could afford 
it (such as take cabs in London), there were wheel- 
barrows, coster carts, and what not, pulled about by 
men for hire ; and it was a sight to remember all 
one's life to see the rich men of Como squatting 
on these carts and barrows, and being pulled about 
over the water by the poor men of Como, being, 
indeed, an epitome of all modern sociology and 
economics and religion and organised charity and 
strenuousness and liberalism and sophistry generally. 

For my part I was determined to explore this 
curious town in the water, and I especially desired 
to see it on the lake side, because there one would 
get the best impression of its being really an aquatic 
town ; so I went northward, as I was directed, and 
came quite unexpectedly upon the astonishing 
cathedral. It seemed built of polished marble, 
and it was in every way so exquisite in propor- 
tion, so delicate in sculpture, and so triumphant 
in attitude, that I thought to myself — 

19 



290 THE LITTLE SEA 

"No wonder men praise Italy if this first Italian 
town has such a building as this." 

But, as you will learn later, many of the things 
praised are ugly, and are praised only by certain fol- 
lowers of charlatans. 

So I went on till I got to the lake, and there I 
found a little port about as big as a dining-room 
(for the Italian lakes play at being little seas. They 
have little ports, little lighthouses, little fleets for war, 
and little custom-houses, and little storms and little 
lines of steamers. Indeed, if one wanted to give a 
rich child a perfect model or toy, one could not give 
him anything better than an Italian lake), and when 
I had long gazed at the town, standing, as it seemed, 
right in the lake, I felt giddy, and said to myself, 
" This is the lack of food," for I had eaten nothing 
but my coffee and bread eleven miles before, at 
dawn. 

So I pulled out my two francs, and going into a 
little shop, I bought bread, sausage, and a very little 
wine for fourpence, and with one franc eighty left I 
stood in the street eating and wondering what my 
next step should be. 

It seemed on the map perhaps twenty-five, per- 
haps twenty-six miles to Milan. It was now nearly 
noon and as hot as could be. I might, if I held 



ESTIMATE OF CONSULS 291 

out, cover the distance in eight or nine hours, but I 
did not see myself walking in the middle heat on 
the plain of Lombardy, and even if I had been able 
I should only have got into Milan at dark or later, 
when the post office (with my money in it) would 
be shut ; and where could I sleep, for my one franc 
eighty would be gone ? A man covering these dis- 
tances must have one good meal a day or he falls 
ill. I could beg, but there was the risk of being 
arrested, and that means an indefinite waste of time, 
perhaps several days ; and time, that had defeated 
me at the Gries, threatened me here again. J had 
nothing to sell or to pawn, and I had no friends. 
The Consul I would not attempt; I knew too 
much of such things as Consuls when poor and 
dirty men try them. Besides which, there was no 
Consul. I pondered. 

I went into the cool of the cathedral to sit in its 
fine darkness and think better. I sat before a shrine 
where candles were burning, put up for their private 
intentions by the faithful. Of many, two had nearly 
burnt out. I watched them in their slow race for 
extinction when a thought took me. 

" I will," said I to myself, " use these candles for 
an ordeal or heavenly judgment. The left hand one 
shall be for attempting the road at the risk of illness 



292 ORDEAL OF THE CANDLES 

or very dangerous failure ; the right hand one shall 
stand for my going by rail till I come to that point 
on the railway where one franc eighty will take 
me, and thence walking into Milan: — and heaven 
defend the right." 

They were a long time going out, and they fell 
evenly. At last the right hand one shot up the 
long flame that precedes the death of candles ; the 
contest took on interest, and even excitement when, 
just as I thought the left hand certain of winning, it 
went out without guess or warning, like a second- 
rate person leaving this world for another. The 
right hand candle waved its flame still higher, as 
though in triumph, outlived its colleague just the 
moment to enjoy glory, and then in its turn went 
fluttering down the dark way from which they say 
there is no return. 

None may protest against the voice of the Gods. 
I went straight to the nearest railway station (for 
there are two), and putting down one franc eighty, 
asked in French for a ticket to whatever station 
that sum would reach down the line. The ticket 
came out marked Milan, and I admitted the 
miracle and confessed the finger of Providence. 
There was no change, and as I got into the train 
I had become that rarest and ultimate kind of 



THE MANY SELVES 293 

traveller, the man without any money whatsoever 
— without passport, without letters, without food or 
wine ; it would be interesting to see what would 
follow if the train broke down. 

• ••••• 

I had marched 378 miles and some three fur- 
longs, or thereabouts. 

Thus did I break — but by a direct command — 
the last and dearest of my vows, and as the train 
rumbled off, I took luxury in the rolling wheels. 

I thought of that other mediaeval and papistical 
pilgrim hobbling along rather than " take advantage 
of any wheeled thing," and I laughed at him. Now 
if Moroso-Malodoroso or any other Non-Aryan, 
Antichristian, over-inductive, statistical, brittle- 
minded man and scientist, sees anything remarkable 
in oneself laughing at another self, let me tell him 
and all such for their wide-eyed edification and 
astonishment that I knew a man once that had 
fifty-six selves (there would have been fifty-seven, 
but for the poet in him that died young) — he could 
evolve them at will, and they were very useful 
to lend to the parish Priest when he wished to make 
up a respectable Procession on Holy-days. And I 
knew another man that could make himself so tall 



294 MILAN 

as to look over the heads of the scientists as a 
pine-tree looks over grasses, and again so small as 
to discern very clearly the thick coating or dust of 
wicked pride that covers them up in a fine im- 
penetrable coat. So much for the moderns. 

The train rolled on. I noticed Lombardy out of 
the windows. It is flat. I listened to the talk of 
the crowded peasants in the train. I did not under- 
stand it. I twice leaned out to see if Milan were 
not standing up before me out of the plain, but I 
saw nothing. Then I fell asleep, and when I woke 
suddenly it was because we were in the terminus of 
that noble great town which I then set out to 
traverse in search of my necessary money and 
sustenance. It was yet but early in the afternoon. 

What a magnificent city is Milan! The great 
houses are all of stone, and stand regular and 
in order, along wide straight streets. There are 
swift cars, drawn by electricity, for such as can 
afford them. Men are brisk and alert even in the 
summer heats, and there are shops of a very good 
kind, though a trifle showy. There are many news- 
papers to help the Milanese to be better men and 
to cultivate charity and humility ; there are banks 



THE CAFE 295 

full of paper money ; there are soldiers, good 
pavements, and all that man requires to fulfil him, 
soul and body ; cafes, arcades, mutoscopes, and 
every sign of the perfect state. And the whole 
centres in a splendid open square, in the midst of 
which is the cathedral, which is justly the most 
renowned in the world. 

My pilgrimage is to Rome, my business is with 
lonely places, hills, and the recollection of the spirit. 
It would be waste to describe at length this mighty 
capital. The mists and the woods, the snows and 
the interminable way had left me ill-suited for the 
place, and I was ashamed. I sat outside a cafe, 
opposite the cathedral, watching its pinnacles of 
light ; but I was ashamed. Perhaps I did the mas- 
ter a hurt by sitting there in his fine great cafe, 
unkempt, in such clothes, like a tramp ; but he was 
courteous in spite of his riches, and I ordered a 
very expensive drink for him also, in order to 
make amends. I showed him my sketches, and 
told him of my adventures in French, and he was 
kind enough to sit opposite me, and to take that 
drink with me. He talked French quite easily, 
as it seems do all such men in the principal towns 
of north Italy. Still, the broad day shamed me, 
and only when darkness came did I feel at ease. 



296 THE AMBROSIAN MASS 

I wandered in the streets till I saw a small 
eating shop, and there I took a good meal. But 
when one is living the life of the poor, one sees how 
hard are the great cities. Everything was dearer, and 
worse, than in the simple countrysides. The inn- 
keeper and his wife were kindly, but their eyes showed 
that they had often to suspect men. They gave 
me a bed, but it was a franc and more, and I had to 
pay before going upstairs to it. The walls were 
mildewed, the place ramshackle and evil, the rickety 
bed not clean, the door broken and warped, and 
that night I was oppressed with the vision of 
poverty. Dirt and clamour and inhuman conditions 
surrounded me. Yet the people meant well. . . . 

With the first light I got up quietly, glad to find 
the street again and the air. I stood in the crypt 
of the cathedral to hear the Ambrosian Mass, and 
it was (as I had expected) like any other, save for a 
kind of second lavabo before the Elevation. To read 
the distorted stupidity of the north one might have 
imagined that in the Ambrosian ritual the priest 
put a non before the credo^ and nee s at each clause 
of it, and renounced his baptismal vows at the 
kyrie ; but the Milanese are Catholics like any others, 
and the northern historians are either liars or igno- 
rant men. And I know three that are both together. 



LOMBARDY 297 

Then I set out down the long street that leads 
south out of Milan, and was soon in the dull and 
sordid suburb of the Piacenzan way. The sky was 
grey, the air chilly, and in a little while — alas ! — 
it rained. 

Lombardy is an alluvial plain. 

That is the pretty way of putting it. The truth 
is more vivid if you say that Lombardy is as flat as 
a marsh, and that it is made up of mud. Of course 
this mud dries when the sun shines on it, but mud 
it is and mud it will remain ; and that day, as the 
rain began falling, mud it rapidly revealed itself to 
be ; and the more did it seem to be mud when one 
saw how the moistening soil showed cracks from 
the last day's heat. 

Lombardy has no forests, but any amount of 
groups of trees ; moreover (what is very remark- 
able), it is all cultivated in fields more or less 
square. These fields have ditches round them, full 
of mud and water running slowly, and some of 
them are themselves under water in order to culti- 
vate rice. All these fields have a few trees border- 
ing them, apart from the standing clumps ; but 
these trees are not very high. There are no open 
views in Lombardy, and Lombardy is all the same. 
Irregular large farmsteads stand at random all 



298 THE LAMBRO 

up and down the country ; no square mile of 
Lombardy is empty. There are many, many little 
villages ; many straggling small towns about seven 
to eight miles apart, and a great number of large 
towns from thirty to fifty miles apart. Indeed, 
this very road to Piacenza, which the rain now 
covered with a veil of despair, was among the 
longest stretches between any two large towns, 
although it was less than fifty miles. 

On the map, before coming to this desolate 
place, there seemed a straighter and a better way 
to Rome than this great road. There is a river 
called the Lambro which comes east of Milan and 
cuts the Piacenzan road at a place called Melegnano. 
It seemed to lead straight down to a point on the 
Po, a little above Piacenza. This stream one could 
follow (so it seemed), and when it joined the Po 
get a boat or ferry, and see on the other side the 
famous Trebbia, where Hannibal conquered and 
Joubert fell, and so make straight on for the 
Apennine. 

Since it is always said in books that Lombardy is 
a furnace in summer, and that whole great armies 
have died of the heat there, this river bank would 
make a fine refuge. Clear and delicious watei, 
more limpid than glass, would reflect and echo the 



NAPOLEON'S ROAD 299 

restless poplars, and would make tolerable or even 
pleasing the excessive summer. Not so. It was a 
northern mind judging by northern things that 
came to this conclusion. There is not in all Lom- 
bardy a clear stream, but every river and brook is 
rolling mud. In the rain, not heat, but a damp 
and penetrating chill was the danger. There is 
no walking on the banks of the rivers ; they are 
cliffs of crumbling soil, jumbled anyhow. 

Man may, as Pinkerton (Sir Jonas Pinkerton) 
writes, be master of his fate, but he has a precious 
poor servant. It is easier to command a lapdog or 
a mule for a whole day than one's own fate for 
half-an-hour. 

Nevertheless, though it was apparent that I should 
have to follow the main road for a while, I deter- 
mined to make at last to the right of it, and to pass 
through a place called " Old Lodi," for I reasoned 
thus : " Lodi is the famous town. How much more 
interesting must Old Lodi be which is the mother- 
town of Lodi ? " Also, Old Lodi brought me back 
again on the straight line to Rome, and I foolishly 
thought it might be possible to hear there of some 
straight path down the Lambro (for that river still 
possessed me somewhat). 

Therefore, after hours and hours of trudging 



300 OLD LODI 

miserably along the wide highway in the wretched 
and searching rain, after splashing through tortuous 
Melegnano, and not even stopping to wonder if it 
was the place of the battle, after noting in despair 
the impossible Lambro, I came, caring for nothing, 
to the place where a secondary road branches off to 
the right over a level crossing and makes for Lodi 
Vecchio. 

It was not nearly midday, but I had walked 
perhaps fifteen miles, and had only rested once in a 
miserable Trattoria. In less than three miles I came 
to that unkempt and lengthy village, founded upon 
dirt and living in misery, and through the quiet, 
cold, persistent rain I splash up the main street. 
I passed wretched, shivering dogs and mourn- 
ful fowls that took a poor refuge against walls ; 
passed a sad horse that hung its head in the wet 
and stood waiting for a master, till at last I reached 
the open square where the church stood, then I 
knew that I had seen all Old Lodi had to offer me. 
So, going into an eating-house, or inn, opposite the 
church, I found a girl and her mother serving, and 
I saluted them, but there was no fire, and my heart 
sank to the level of that room, which was, I am 
sure, no more than fifty-four degrees. 



ITS UGLY CHURCH 



301 



Why should the less gracious part of a pilgrim- 
age be specially remembered ? In life we remember 
joy best — that is what makes us sad by contrast ; 
pain somewhat, especially if it is acute ; but dulness 
never. And a book — which has it in its own power 
to choose and to emphasise — has no business to 
record dulness. What did I at Lodi Vecchio ? I 
ate ; I dried my clothes before a tepid stove in a 
kitchen. I tried to make myself understood by the 
girl and her mother. I sat at 
a window and drew the ugly 
church on principle. Oh, the 
vile sketch ! Worthy of that 
Lombard plain, which they 
had told me was so full of 
wonderful things. I gave up J^T 
all hope of by-roads, and I If^fpf 
determined to push back 
obliquely to the highway 
again — obliquely in order to save time ! Nepios ! 

These " by-roads " of the map turned out in real 
life to be all manner of abominable tracks. Some 
few were metalled, some were cart-ruts merely, 
some were open lanes of rank grass ; and along most 
there went a horrible ditch, and in many fields the 
standing water proclaimed desolation. In so far as 




3 o2 THE MIRACLE 

I can be said to have had a way at all, I lost it. I 
could not ask my way because my only ultimate 
goal was Piacenza, and that was far off. I did not 
know the name of any place between. Two or 
three groups of houses I passed, and sometimes 
church towers glimmered through the rain. I 
passed a larger and wider road than the rest, but 
obviously not my road ; I pressed on and passed 
another; and by this time, having ploughed up 
Lombardy for some four hours, I was utterly lost. 
I no longer felt the north, and, for all I knew, 
I might be going backwards. The only certain 
thing was that I was somewhere in the belt 
between the highroad and the Lambro, and that 
was little enough to know at the close of such a 
day. Grown desperate, I clamoured within my 
mind for a miracle ; and it was not long before 
I saw a little bent man sitting on a crazy cart and 
going ahead of me at a pace much slower than 
a walk — the pace of a horse crawling. I caught 
him up, and, doubting much whether he would 
understand a word, I said to him repeatedly — 
" La granda via ? La via a Piacenza ? " 
He shook his head as though to indicate that 
this filthy lane was not the road. Just as I had 
despaired of learning anything, he pointed with his 



NOTHING MUCH 303 

arm away to the right, perpendicularly to the road 
we were on, and nodded. He moved his hand up 
and down. I had been going north ! 

On getting this sign I did not wait for a cross 
road, but jumped the little ditch and pushed 
through long grass, across further ditches, along 
the side of patches of growing corn, heedless of 
the huge weight on my boots and of the oozing 
ground, till I saw against the rainy sky a line of 
telegraph poles. For the first time since they were 
made the sight of them gave a man joy. There 
was a long stagnant pond full of reeds between me 
and the railroad ; but, as I outflanked it, I came 
upon a road that crossed the railway at a level and 
led me into the great Piacenzan way. Almost 
immediately appeared a village. It was a hole 
called Secugnano, and there I entered a house 
where a bush hanging above the door promised 
entertainment, and an old hobbling woman gave me 
food and drink and a bed. The night had fallen, and 
upon the roof above me I could hear the steady rain. 

The next morning — Heaven preserve the world 
from evil ! — it was still raining. 

Lector. It does not seem to me that this part of 
your book is very entertaining. 



304 STORY OF CHARLES BLAKE 

Auctor. I know that; but what am I to do? 

Lector. Why, what was the next point in the 
pilgrimage that was even tolerably noteworthy ? 

Auctor. I suppose the Bridge of Boats. 

Lector. And how far on was that? 

Auctor. About fourteen miles, more or less. 
... I passed through a town with a name as long 
as my arm, and I suppose the Bridge of Boats must 
have been nine miles on after that. 

Lector. And it rained all the time, and there 
was mud ? 

Auctor. Precisely. 

Lector. Well, then, let us skip it and tell 
stories. 

Auctor. With all my heart. And since you 
are such a good judge of literary poignancy, do you 
begin. 

Lector. I will, and I draw my inspiration from 
your style. 

Once upon a time there was a man who was 
born in Croydon and whose name was Charles 
Amieson Blake. He went to Rugby at twelve and 
left it at seventeen. He fell in love twice and 
then went to Cambridge till he was twenty-three. 
Having left Cambridge he fell in love more mildly 
and was put by his father into a government 



STORY OF MR. BLAKE 305 

office, where he began at ^180 a year. At thirty- 
five he was earning _£s°° a vear > an d perquisites 
made £750 a year. He met a pleasant lady and 
fell in love quite a little compared with the other 
times. She had ^250 a year. That made ^1000 
a year. They married and had three children — 
Richard, Amy, and Cornelia. He rose to a high 
government position, was knighted, retired at 
sixty-three, and died at sixty-seven. He is buried 
at Kensal Green. . . . 

Auctor. Thank you, Lector, that is a very good 
story. It is simple and full of plain human 
touches. You know how to deal with the facts of 
everyday life. ... It requires a master-hand. Tell 
me, Lector, had this man any adventures ? 

Lector. None that I know of. 

Auctor. Had he opinions ? 

Lector. Yes. I forgot to tell you he was a 
Unionist. He spoke two foreign languages badly. 
He often went abroad to Assisi, Florence, and 
Boulogne. . . . He left £7623 6s. 8d., and a 
house and garden at Sutton. His wife lives there 
still. 

Auctor. Oh ! 

Lector. It is the human story . . . the daily 

task! 

20 



3 o6 STORY OF THE DKVIL 

Auctor. Very true, my dear Lector . . . the 
common lot . . . now let me tell my story. It is 
about the Hole that could not be Pilled Up. 

Lector. Oh no ! Auctor, no ! That is the 
oldest story in the 

Auctor. Patience, dear Lector, patience ! I 
will tell it well. Besides which I promise you it 
shall never be told again. I will copyright it. 

Well, once there was a Learned Man who had 
a bargain with the Devil that he should warn the 
Devil's emissaries of all the good deeds done around 
him so that they could be upset, and he in turn 
was to have all those pleasant things of this life 
which the Devil's allies usually get, to wit a Com- 
fortable Home, Self-Respect, good health, " enough 
money for one's rank " and generally what is called 
"a happy useful life " — //// midnight of All-Hal- 
lowe'en in the last year of the nineteenth century. 

So this Learned Man did all he was required, 
and daily would inform the messenger imps of 
the good being done or prepared in the neigh- 
bourhood, and they would upset it ; so that the 
place he lived in from a nice country town became 
a great Centre of Industry, full of wealth and de- 
sirable family mansions and street property, and 
was called in hell " Depot B " (Depot A you may 



AND THE LEARNED MAN 307 

guess at). But at last toward the 15th of Octo- 
ber 1900, the Learned Man began to shake in his 
shoes and to dread the judgment ; for, you see, 
he had not the comfortable ignorance of his kind, 
and was compelled to believe in the Devil willy- 
nilly, and, as I say, he shook in his shoes. 

So he bethought him of a plan to cheat the 
Devil, and the day before All-Hallowe'en he cut a 
very small round hole in the floor of his study, 
just near the fireplace, right through down to the 
cellar. Then he got a number of things that do 
great harm (newspapers, legal documents, unpaid 
bills, and so forth) and made ready for action. 

Next morning when the little imps came for 
orders as usual, after prayers, he took them down 
into the cellar, and pointing out the hole in the 
ceiling, he said to them : — 

" My friends, this little hole is a mystery. It 
communicates, I believe, with the chapel ; but I 
cannot find the exit. All I know is, that some 
pious person or angel, or what not, desirous to do 
good, slips into it every day whatever he thinks 
may be a cause of evil in the neighbourhood, 
hoping thus to destroy it " (in proof of which 
statement he showed them a scattered heap of 
newspapers on the floor of the cellar beneath the 



3 o8 STORY OF THE DEVIL 

hole). "And the best thing you can do," he 
added, " is to stay here and take them away as 
fast as they come down and put them back into 
circulation again. Tut! tut!" he added, picking 
up a money-lender's threatening letter to a widow, 
" it is astonishing how these people interfere with 
the most sacred rights ! Here is a letter actu- 
ally stolen from the post ! Pray see that it is 
delivered." 

So he left the little imps at work, and fed them 
from above with all manner of evil-doing things, 
which they as promptly drew into the cellar, and at 
intervals flew away with, to put them into circula- 
tion again. 

That evening, at about half-past eleven, the Devil 
came to fetch the Learned Man, and found him 
seated at his fine great desk, writing. The Learned 
Man got up very affably to receive the Devil, and 
offered him a chair by the fire, just near the little 
round hole. 

" Pray don't move," said the Devil ; " I came 
early on purpose not to disturb you." 

"You are very good," replied the Learned 
Man. "The fact is, I have to finish my report on 
Lady Grope's Settlement among our Poor in the 
Bull Ring — it is making some progress. But their 



AND THE LEARNED MAN 309 

condition is heart-breaking, my dear sir ; heart- 
breaking ! " 

" I can well believe it," said the Devil sadly and 
solemnly, leaning back in his chair, and pressing his 
hands together like a roof. " The poor in our great 
towns, Sir Charles " (for the Learned Man had been 
made a Baronet), " the condition, I say, of the — 
Don't I feel a draught ? " he added abruptly. For 
the Devil can't bear draughts. 

" Why," said the Learned Man, as though 
ashamed, "just near your chair there is a little hole 
that I have done my best to fill up, but somehow it 
seemed impossible to fill it . . . I don't know . . ." 

The Devil hates excuses, and is above all prac- 
tical, so he just whipped the soul of a lawyer out of 
his side-pocket, tied a knot in it to stiffen it, and 
shoved it into the hole. 

" There ! " said the Devil contentedly ; " if you 
had taken a piece of rag, or what not, you might 
yourself . . . Hulloa ! . . ." He looked down 
and saw the hole still gaping, and he felt a furious 
draught coming up again. He wondered a little, 
and then muttered : " It 's a pity I have on my 
best things. I never dare crease them, and I have 
nothing in my pockets to speak of, otherwise I 
might have brought something bigger." He felt 



3 io STORY OF THE DEVIL 

in his left-hand trouser pocket, and fished out a 
pedant, crumpled him carefully into a ball, and 
stuffed him hard into the hole, so that he suffered 
agonies. Then the Devil watched carefully. The 
soul of the pedant was at first tugged as if from 
below, then drawn slowly down, and finally shot off 
out of sight. 

"This is a most extraordinary thing ! " said the 
Devil. 

" It is the draught. It is very strong between 
the joists," ventured the Learned Man. 

" Fiddle-sticks ends ! " shouted the Devil. " It 
is a trick ! But I 've never been caught yet, and I 
never will be." 

He clapped his hands, and a whole host of his 
followers poured in through the windows with 
mortgages, Acts of Parliament, legal decisions, 
declarations of war, charters to universities, patents 
for medicines, naturalisation orders, shares in gold 
mines, specifications, prospectuses, water companies' 
reports, publishers' agreements, letters patent, free- 
doms of cities, and, in a word, all that the Devil con- 
trols in the way of hole-stopping rubbish ; and the 
Devil, kneeling on the floor, stuffed them into the hole 
like a madman. But as fast as he stuffed, the little 
imps below (who had summoned a number of their 



AND THE LEARNED MAN 311 

kind to their aid also) pulled it through and carted 
it away. And the Devil, like one possessed, lashed 
the floor with his tail, and his eyes glared like coals 
of fire, and the sweat ran down his face, and he 
breathed hard, and pushed every imaginable thing 
he had into the hole so swiftly that at last his 
documents and parchments looked like streaks and 
flashes. But the loyal little imps, not to be beaten, 
drew them through into the cellar as fast as 
machinery, and whirled them to their assistants ; 
and all the poor lost souls who had been pressed 
into the service were groaning that their one holi- 
day in the year was being filched from them, when, 
just as the process was going on so fast that it 
roared like a printing-machine in full blast, the 
clock in the hall struck twelve. 

The Devil suddenly stopped and stood up. 

" Out of my house," said the Learned Man ; 
" out of my house ! I 've had enough of you, and 
I 've no time for fiddle-faddle ! It 's past twelve, 
and I 've won ! " 

The Devil, though still panting, smiled a dia- 
bolical smile, and pulling out his repeater (which 
he had taken as a perquisite from the body of a 
member of Parliament), said, " I suppose you keep 
Greenwich time ? " 



3 i2 APPARITION OF 

" Certainly ! " said Sir Charles. 

" Well," said the Devil, " so much the worse for 
you to live in Suffolk. You 're four minutes fast, 
so I '11 trouble you to come along with me; and I 
warn you that any words you now say may be used 
against . . ." 

At this point the Learned Man's patron saint, 
who thought things had gone far enough, material- 
ised himself and coughed gently. They both 
looked round, and there was St. Charles sitting in 
the easy chair. 

" So far," murmured the Saint to the Devil 
suavely, " so far from being four minutes too early, 
you are exactly a year too late." On saying this, 
the Saint smiled a genial, priestly smile, folded his 
hands, twiddled his thumbs slowly round and 
round, and gazed in a fatherly way at the Devil. 

" What do you mean ? " shouted the Devil. 

"What I say," said St. Charles calmly; " 1900 
is not the last year of the nineteenth century ; it is 
the first year of the twentieth." 

" Oh ! " sneered the Devil, " are you an anti- 
vaccinationist as well ? Now, look here " (and he 
began counting on his fingers) ; " supposing, in the 
year 1 b.c. . . ." 

" I never argue," said St. Charles. 



ST. CHARLES BORROMEO 313 

"Well, all I know is," answered the Devil with 
some heat, " that in this matter as in most others, 
thank the Lord, I have on my side all the his- 
torians and all the scientists, all the universities, 
all the ..." 

"And I," interrupted St. Charles, waving his 
hand like a gentleman (he is a Borromeo), " I have 
the Pope ! " 

At this the Devil gave a great howl, and dis- 
appeared in a clap of thunder, and was never seen 
again till his recent appearance at Brighton. 

So the Learned Man was saved ; but hardly ; for 
he had to spend five hundred years in Purgatory 
catechising such heretics and pagans as got there 
and instructing them in the true faith. And with 
the more muscular he passed a knotty time. 

You do not see the river Po till you are close to 
it. Then, a little crook in the road being passed, 
you come between high trees, and straight out 
before you, level with you, runs the road into and 
over a very wide mass of tumbling water. It does 
not look like a bridge, it looks like a quay. It 
does not rise ; it has all the appearance of being a 
strip of road shaved off and floated on the water. 

All this is because it passes over boats, as do some 



3 i 4 ON THE GERMANS 

bridges over the Rhine. (At Cologne, I believe, and 
certainly at Kiel — for I once sat at the end of that 
and saw a lot of sad German soldiers drilling, a 
memory which later made me understand ( i ) why 
they can be out-marched by Latins; (2) why they 
impress travellers and civilians; (3) why the 
governing class in Germany take care to avoid 
common service; (4) why there is no promotion 
from the ranks ; and ( 5 ) why their artillery is too 
rigid and not quick enough. It also showed me 
something intimate and fundamental about the 
Germans which Tacitus never understood and which 
all our historians miss — they are of necessity his- 
trionic. Note I do not say it is a vice of theirs. 
It is a necessity of theirs, an appetite. They must 
see themselves on a stage. Whether they do things 
well or ill, whether it is their excellent army with 
its ridiculous parade, or their eighteenth-century 
sans-soucis with avenues and surprises, or their 
national legends with gods in wigs and strong men 
in tights, they must be play-actors to be happy and 
therefore to be efficient ; and if I were Lord of 
Germany, and desired to lead my nation and to be 
loved by them, I should put great golden feathers 
on my helmet, I should use rhetorical expressions, 
spout monologues in public, organise wide cavalry 



THE BRIDGE OF BOATS 315 

charges at reviews, and move through life generally 
to the crashing of an orchestra. For by doing this 
even a vulgar, short, and diseased man, who dabbled 
in stocks and shares and was led by financiers, could 
become a hero and do his nation good.) 

Lector. What is all this ? 

Auctor. It is a parenthesis. 

Lector. It is good to know the names of the 
strange things one meets with on one's travels. 

Auctor. So I return to where I branched off, 
and tell you that the river Po is here crossed by 
a bridge of boats. 

It is a very large stream. Half-way across, it is 
even a trifle uncomfortable to be so near the rush 
of the water on the trembling pontoons. And on 
that day its speed and turbulence were emphasised 
by the falling rain. For the marks of the rain on 
the water showed the rapidity of the current, and 
the silence of its fall framed and enhanced the swirl 
of the great river. 

Once across, it is a step up into Piacenza — a 
step through mud and rain. On my right was 
that plain where Barbarossa received, and was 
glorified by, the rising life of the twelfth century ; 
there the renaissance of our Europe saw the future 
glorious for the first time since the twilight of 



316 THE MOOR'S HEAD 

Rome, and being full of morning they imagined 
a new earth and gave it a Lord. It was at 
Roncaglia, I think in spring, and I wish I had 
been there. For in spring even the Lombard plain 
they say is beautiful and generous, but in summer 
I know by experience that it is cold, brutish, 
and wet. 

And so in Piacenza it rained and there was 
mud, till I came to a hotel called the Moor's 
Head, in a very narrow street, and entering it 
I discovered a curious thing: the Italians live in 
palaces : I might have known it. 

They are the impoverished heirs of a great 
time ; its garments cling to them, but their rooms 
are too large for the modern penury. I found 
these men eating in a great corridor, in a hall, 
as they might do in a palace. I found high, 
painted ceilings and many things of marble, a vast 
kitchen, and all the apparatus of the great houses 
— at the service of a handful of contented, un- 
known men. So in England, when we have worked 
out our full fate, happier but poorer men will sit 
in the faded country-houses (a community, or an 
inn, or impoverished squires), and rough food will 
be eaten under mouldering great pictures, and 
there will be offices or granaries in the galleries 



THE EMILIAN WAY 317 

of our castles ; and where Lord Saxonthorpe (whose 
real name is Hauptstein) now plans our policy, 
common Englishmen will return to the simpler 
life, and there will be dogs, and beer, and catches 
upon winter evenings. For Italy also once gathered 
by artifice the wealth that was not of her making. 

He was a good man, the innkeeper of this 
palace. He warmed me at his fire in his enormous 
kitchen, and I drank malaga to the health of the 
cooks. I ate of their food, I bought a bottle of 
a new kind of sweet wine called " Vino Dolce," 
and — I took the road. 

Lector. And did you see nothing of Piacenza ? 

Auctor. Nothing, Lector; it was raining, and 
there was mud. I stood in front of the cathedral 
on my way out, and watched it rain. It rained 
all along the broad and splendid Emilian Way. 
I had promised myself great visions of the Roman 
soldiery passing up that eternal road ; it still was 
stamped with the imperial mark, but the rain 
washed out its interest, and left me cold. The 
Apennines also, rising abruptly from the plain, were 
to have given me revelations at sunset ; they gave 
me none. Their foothills appeared continually on 
my right, they themselves were veiled. And all 
these miles of road fade into the confused memory 



3*8 



THE EMILIAN WAY 



of that intolerable plain. The night at Firenzuola 

the morning (the second morning of this visita- 




tion) still cold, still heartless, and sodden with the 
abominable weather, shall form no part of this 
book. 



Things grand and simple of their nature are 
possessed, as you know, of a very subtle flavour. 
The larger music, the more majestic lengths of 
verse called epics, the exact in sculpture, the 
classic drama, the most absolute kinds of wine, 
require a perfect harmony of circumstance for 



ON PERFECT THINGS 319 

their appreciation. Whatever is strong, poignant, 
and immediate in its effect is not so difficult to 
suit ; farce, horror, rage, or what not, these a man 
can find in the arts, even when his mood may be 
heavy or disturbed ; just as (to take their parallel 
in wines) strong Beaune will always rouse a man. 
But that which is cousin to the immortal spirit 
and which has, so to speak, no colour but mere 
light, that needs for its recognition so serene an 
air of abstraction and of content as makes its 
pleasure seem rare in this troubled life, and causes 
us to recall it like a descent of the gods. 

For who, having noise around him, can strike 
the table with pleasure at reading the Misanthrope, 
or in mere thirst or in fatigue praise Chinon wine? 
Who does not need for either of these perfect things 
Recollection, a variety of according conditions, and 
a certain easy Plenitude of the Mind ? 

So it is with the majesty of Plains, and with the 
haunting power of their imperial roads. 

All you that have had your souls touched at 
the innermost, and have attempted to release your- 
selves in verse and have written trash — (and who 
know it) — be comforted. You shall have satis- 
faction at last, and you shall attain fame in some 



3 2o FUGUE 

other fashion — perhaps in private theatricals or 
perhaps in journalism. You will be granted a 
prevision of complete success, and your hearts 
shall be filled — but you must not expect to find 
this mood on the Emilian Way when it is 
raining. 

All you that feel youth slipping past you and 
that are desolate at the approach of age, be merry ; 
it is not what it looks like from in front and from 
outside. There is a glory in all completion, and 
all good endings are but shining transitions. 
There will come a sharp moment of revelation 
when you shall bless the effect of time. But this 
divine moment — it is not on the Emilian Way in 
the rain that you should seek it. 

All you that have loved passionately and have 
torn your hearts asunder in disillusions, do not 
imagine that things broken cannot be mended by 
the good angels. There is a kind of splice called 
"the long splice" which makes a cut rope seem 
what it was before ; it is even stronger than before, 
and can pass through a block. There will descend 
upon you a blessed hour when you will be con- 
vinced as by a miracle, and you will suddenly 



INTERLUDE 321 

understand the redintegratio amoris {amoris redin- 
tegratio, a Latin phrase). But this hour you will 
not receive in the rain on the Emilian Way. 

Here then, next day, just outside a town called 
Borgo, past the middle of morning, the rain ceased. 

Its effect was still upon the slippery and shining 
road, the sky was still fast and leaden, when, in 
a distaste for their towns, I skirted the place 
by a lane that runs westward of the houses, and 
sitting upon a low wall, I looked up at the 
Apennines, which were now plain above me, and 
thought over my approaching passage through 
those hills. 

But here I must make clear by a map the mass 
of mountains which I was about to attempt, and 
in which I forded so many rivers, met so many 
strange men and beasts, saw such unaccountable 
sights, was imprisoned, starved, frozen, haunted, 
delighted, burnt up, and finally refreshed in 
Tuscany — in a word, where I had the most ex- 
traordinary and unheard-of adventures that ever 
diversified the life of man. 

The straight line to Rome runs from Milan not 
quite through Piacenza, but within a mile or two 
of that city. Then it runs across the first folds 



322 UNIMPORTANT 

of the Apennines, and gradually diverges from the 
Emilian Way. It was not possible to follow this 
part of the line exactly, for there was no kind of 
track. But by following the Emilian Way tor 
several miles (as I had done), and by leaving it 
at the right moment, it was possible to strike the 
straight line again near a village called Medesano. 

Now on the far side of the Apennines, beyond 
their main crest, there happens, most providentially, 
to be a river called the Serchio, whose valley is 
fairly straight and points down directly to Rome. 
To follow this valley would be practically to fol- 
low the line to Rome, and it struck the Tuscan 
plain not far from Lucca. 

But to get from the Emilian Way over the 
eastern slope of the Apennines' main ridge and 
crest, to where the Serchio rises on the western 
side, is a very difficult matter. The few roads 
across the Apennines cut my track at right 
angles, and were therefore useless. In order to 
strike the watershed at the sources of the Serchio 
it was necessary to go obliquely across a torrent 
and four rivers (the Taro, the Parma, the Enza, 
and the Secchia), and to climb the four spurs 
that divided them ; crossing each nearer to the 
principal chain as I advanced until, after the 



TOPOGRAPHY 



3*3 



Secchia, the next climb would be that of the 
central crest itself, on the far side of which I 
should find the Serchio valley. 

Perhaps in places roads might correspond to 
this track. Certainly the 
bulk of it would be mule 
paths or rough gullies — 
how much I could not 
tell. The only way I 
could work it with my 
wretched map was to note 
the names of towns or 
hamlets more or less on 
the line, and to pick my 
way from one to another. 
I wrote them down as 
follows : Fornovo, Cales- 
tano, Tizzano, Colagna *'* 

— the last at the foot of the final pass. The dis- 
tance to that pass as the crow flies was only a little 
more than thirty miles. So exceedingly difficult 
was the task that it took me over two days. Till I 
reached Fornovo beyond the Taro, I was not really 
in the hills. 




By country roads, picking my way, I made that 



324 THE RED INN 

afternoon for Medesano. The lanes were tortuous; 
they crossed continual streams that ran from the 
hills above, full and foaming after the rain, and 
frothing with the waste of the mountains. I had 
not gone two miles when the sky broke ; not four 
when a new warmth began to steal over the air 
and a sense of summer to appear in the earth 
about me. With the greatest rapidity the unusual 
weather that had accompanied me from Milan was 
changing into the normal brilliancy of the south ; 
but it was too late for the sun to tell, though he 
shone from time to time through clouds that were 
now moving eastwards more perceptibly and shred- 
ding as they moved. 

Quite tired and desiring food, keen also for rest 
after those dispiriting days, I stopped, before 
reaching Medesano, at an inn where three ways 
met ; and there I purposed to eat and spend the 
night, for the next day, it was easy to see, would 
be tropical, and I should rise before dawn if I was 
to save the heat. I entered. 

The room within was of red wood. It had two 
tables, a little counter with a vast array of bottles, 
a woman behind the counter, and a small, nervous 
man in a strange hat serving. And all the little 
place was filled and crammed with a crowd of 



THE TAVERN BRAWL 32$ 

perhaps twenty men, gesticulating, shouting, laugh- 
ing, quarrelling, and one very big man was explain- 
ing to another the virtues of his knife ; and all were 
already amply satisfied with wine. For in this part 
men do not own, but are paid wages, so that they 
waste the little they have. 

I saluted the company, and walking up to the 
counter was about to call for wine. They had all 
become silent, when one man asked me a question 
in Italian. I did not understand it, and attempted 
to say so, when another asked the same question ; 
then six or seven — and there was a hubbub. And 
out of the hubbub I heard a similar sentence rising 
all the time. To this day I do not know what it 
meant, but I thought (and think) it meant " he is a 
Venetian," or " he is the Venetian." Something in 
my broken language had made them think this, and 
evidently the Venetians (or a Venetian) were (or 
was) gravely unpopular here. Why, I cannot tell. 
Perhaps the Venetians were blacklegs. But evi- 
dently a Venetian, or the whole Venetian nation, 
had recently done them a wrong. 

At any rate one very dark-haired man put his 
face close up to mine, unlipped his teeth, and began 
a great noise of cursing and threatening, and this so 
angered me that it overmastered my fear, which 



3 26 THE QUARREL 

had till then been considerable. I remembered also 
a rule which a wise man once told me for guidance, 
and it is this : " God disposes of victory, but, as the 
world is made, when men smile, smile; when men 
laugh, laugh ; when men hit, hit ; when men shout, 
shout ; and when men curse, curse you also, my son, 
and in doubt let them always take the first move." 

I say my fear had been considerable, especially 
of the man with the knife, but I got too angry to 
remember it, and advancing my face also to this 
insulter's I shouted, " Dio Ladro I Dios di mi alma ! 
Sanguinamento ! N ombre di Dios ! Che ? Che vole ? 
Non sono da Venezia io ! Sono de Francia ! Je m'en 
fiche da vestra Venezia ! Non se vede che non parlar 
vestra lingua? Che sono forestiere ? " and so forth. 
At this they evidently divided into two parties, and 
all began raging amongst themselves, and some at 
me, while the others argued louder and louder that 
there was an error. 

The little innkeeper caught my arm over the 
counter, and I turned round sharply, thinking he 
was doing me a wrong, but I saw him nodding and 
winking at me, and he was on my side. This was 
probably because he was responsible if anything hap- 
pened, and he alone could not fly from the police. 

He made them a speech which, for all I know, 



THE ODD KNIFE 327 

may have been to the effect that he had known 
and loved me from childhood, or may have been 
that he knew me for one Jacques of Turin, or may 
have been any other lie. Whatever lie it was, it 
appeased them. Their anger went down to a mur- 
mur, just like soda-water settling down into a glass. 

I stood wine ; we drank. I showed them my 
book, and as my pencil needed sharpening the large 
man lent me his knife for courtesy. When I got it 
in my hand I saw plainly that it was 

no knife for stabbing stft^* w * tn > it- 

was a pruning-knife, // an d would 

have bit the hand J^gf tnat cherished 

it (as they say Jfr'-'jW °f serpents). On 

the other hand, JfwW it would have been a 
good knife for \^W ripping, and passable at a 
slash. You TT must not expect too much 

of one article. 

I took food, but I saw that in this parish it 
was safer to sleep out of doors than in ; so in the 
falling evening, but not yet sunset, I wandered 
on, not at a pace but looking for shelter, and I 
found at last just what I wanted : a little shed, 
with dried ferns (as it seemed) strewed in a corner, 
a few old sacks, and a broken piece of machinery — 
though this last was of no use to me. 



328 THE CLOUDS 

I thought: " It will be safe here, for I shall rise 
before day, and the owner, if there is one, will not 
disturb me." 

The air was fairly warm. The place quite dry. 
The open side looked westward and a little south. 

The sun had now set behind the Apennines, and 
there was a deep effulgence in the sky. I drank 
a little wine, lit a pipe, and watched the west in 
silence. 

Whatever was left of the great pall from which 
all that rain had fallen, now was banked up on the 
further side of heaven in toppling great clouds that 
caught the full glow of evening. 

The great clouds stood up in heaven, separate, 
like persons; and no wind blew; but everything 
was full of evening. I worshipped them so far 
as it is permitted to worship inanimate things. 

They domed into the pure light of the higher 
air, inviolable. They seemed halted in the presence 
of a commanding majesty who ranked them all in 
order. 

This vision filled me with a large calm which a 
travelled man may find on coming to his home, or 
a learner in the communion of wise men. Repose, 
certitude, and as it were, a premonition of glory 
occupied my spirit. Before it was yet quite dark 



THE IMPASSABLE RIVER 329 

I had made a bed out of the dry bracken, covered 
myself with the sacks and cloths, and very soon I 
fell asleep, still thinking of the shapes of clouds 
and of the power of God. 

Next morning it was as I had thought. Going 
out before it was fully light, a dense mist all around 
and a clear sky showed what the day was to be. As 
I reached Medesano the sun rose, and in half-an- 
hour the air was instinct with heat; within an hour 
it was blinding. An early Mass in the church 
below the village prepared my day, but as I took 
coffee afterwards in a little inn, and asked about 
crossing the Taro to Fornovo — my first point — to 
my astonishment they shook their heads. The 
Taro was impassable. 

Why could it not be crossed ? My very broken 
language made it difficult for me to understand. 
They talked of rami, which I thought meant oars ; 
but rami, had I known it, meant the separate branches 
or streams whereby these torrential rivers of Italy 
flow through their arid beds. 

I drew a boat and asked if one could not cross in 
that (for I was a northerner, and my idea of a river 
was a river with banks and water in between), but 
they laughed and said " No." Then I made the 



33 o THE CROSSING OF 

motion of swimming. They said it was impossible, 
and one man hung his head to indicate drowning. 
It was serious. They said to-morrow, or rather 
next day, one might do it. 

Finally, a boy that stood by said he remembered 
a man who knew the river better than any one, and 
he, if any one could, would get me across. So I 
took the boy with me up the road, and as we went 
I saw, parallel to the road, a wide plain of dazzling 
rocks and sand, and beyond it, shining and silhouetted 
like an Arab village, the group of houses that was 
Fornovo. This plain was their sort of river in 
these hills. The boy said that sometimes it was 
full and a mile wide, sometimes it dwindled into 
dirty pools. Now, as I looked, a few thin streams 
seemed to wind through it, and I could not under- 
stand the danger. 




-JS&bZ?- 



After a mile or two we came to a spot in the 
road where a patch of brushwood only separated us 
from the river-bed. Here the boy bade me wait, 



THE TARO 331 

and asked a group of peasants whether the guide 
was in ; they said they thought so, and some went 
up into the hillside with the boy to fetch him, 
others remained with me, looking at the river-bed 
and at Fornovo beyond, shaking their heads, and 
saying it had not been done for days. But I did 
not understand whether the rain-freshet had passed 
and was draining away, or whether it had not yet 
come down from beyond, and I waited for the 
guide. 

They brought him at last down from his hut 
among the hills. He came with great strides, 
a kindly-looking man, extremely tall and thin, 
and with very pale eyes. He smiled. They 
pointed me out to him, and we struck the bar- 
gain by holding up three fingers each for three 
lira, and nodding. Then he grasped his long 
staff and I mine, we bade farewell to the party, 
and together we went in silence through thick 
brushwood down towards the broad river-bed. 
The stones of it glared like the sands of Africa; 
Fornovo baked under the sun all white and black ; 
between us was this broad plain of parched shingle 
and rocks that could, in a night, become one 
enormous river, or dwindle to a chain of stag- 



332 THE CROSSING OF 

nant ponds. To-day some seven narrow streams 
wandered in the expanse, and again they seemed 
so easy to cross that again I wondered at the 
need of a guide. 

We came to the edge of the first, and I climbed 
on the guide's back. He went bare-legged into 
the stream deeper and deeper till my feet, though 
held up high, just touched the water ; then 
laboriously he climbed the further shore, and I 
got down upon dry land. It had been but twenty 
yards or so, and he knew the place well. I had 
seen, as we crossed, what a torrent this first little 
stream was, and I now knew the difficulty and 
understood the warnings of the inn. 

The second branch was impassable. We followed 
it up for nearly a mile to where " an island " (that 
is, a mass of high land that must have been an 
island in flood-time, and that had on it an old 
brown village) stood above the white bed of the 
river. Just at this "island" my guide found a 
ford. And the way he found it is worth telling. 
He taught me the trick, and it is most useful to 
men who wander alone in mountains. 

You take a heavy stone, how heavy you must 
learn to judge, for a more rapid current needs 
a heavier stone ; but say about ten pounds. This 



THE TARO 333 

you lob gently into mid-stream. How, it is im- 
possible to describe, but when you do it it is quite 
easy to see that in about four feet of water, or 
less, the stone splashes quite differently from the 
way it does in five feet or more. It is a sure 
test, and one much easier to acquire by practice 
than to write about. To teach myself this trick I 
practised it throughout my journey in these wilds. 

Having found a ford then, he again took me 
on his shoulders, but, in mid-stream, the water 
being up to his breast, his foot slipped on a stone 
(all the bed beneath was rolling and churning in 
the torrent), and in a moment we had both fallen. 
He pulled me up straight by his side, and then 
indeed, overwhelmed in the rush of water, it was 
easy to understand how the Taro could drown men, 
and why the peasants dreaded these little ribbons 
of water. 

The current rushed and foamed past me, coming 
nearly to my neck ; and it was icy cold. One had 
to lean against it, and the water so took away one's 
weight that at any moment one might have slipped 
and been carried away. The guide, a much taller 
man (indeed he was six foot three or so), sup- 
ported me, holding my arm ; and again in a 
moment we reached dry land. 



334 ST. CHRISTOPHER 

After that adventure there was no need for 
carrying. The third, fourth, fifth, and sixth 
branches were easily fordable. The seventh was 
broad and deep, and I found it a heavy matter; 
nor should I have waded it but for my guide, 
for the water bore against me like a man wrestling, 
and it was as cold as Acheron, the river of the 
dead. Then on the further shore, and warning 
him (in Lingua Franca) of his peril, I gave him 
his wage, and he smiled and thanked me, and 
went back, choosing his plans at leisure. 

Thus did I cross the river Taro ; a danger for 
men. 

Where I landed was a poor man sunning himself. 
He rose and walked with me to Fornovo. He 
knew the guide. 

" He is a good man," he said to me of this 
friend. " He is as good as a little piece of 
bread." 

" E vero," I answered ; " e San Cristophero." 

This pleased the peasant ; and indeed it was 
true. For the guide's business was exactly that 
of St. Christopher, except that the Saint took no 
money, and lived, I suppose, on air. 

And so to Fornovo ; and the heat blinded and 



FORNOVO CHURCH 335 

confused, and the air was alive with flies. But 
the sun dried me at once, and I pressed up 
the road because I needed food. After I had 
eaten in this old town I was preparing to make 
for Calestano and to cross the first high spur of 
the Apennines that separated me from it, when 
I saw, as I left the place, a very old church ; and 
I stayed a moment and looked at carvings which 
were in no order, but put in pell-mell, evidently 
chosen from some older building. They were 
barbaric, but one could see that they stood for 
the last judgment of man, and there were the good 
looking foolish, and there were the wicked being 
boiled by devils in a pot, and what was most 
pleasing was one devil who with great joy was 
carrying off a rich man's gold in a bag. But 
now we are too wise to believe in such follies, 
and when we die we take our wealth with us ; 
in the ninth century they had no way of doing 
this, for no system of credit yet obtained. 

Then leaving the main road which runs to 
Pontremoli and at last to Spezzia, my lane 
climbed up into the hills and ceased, little by little, 
to be even a lane. It became from time to time 
the bed of a stream, then nothing, then a lane 
again, and at last, at the head of the glen, I con- 



336 THE LOST PATH 

fessed to having lost it ; but I noted a great rock 
or peak above me for a landmark, and I said to 
myself — 

" No matter. The wall of this glen before me 
is obviously the ridge of the spur ; the rock must 
be left to the north, and I have but to cross the 
ridge by its guidance." By this time, however, 
the heat overcame me, and, as it was already after- 
noon and as I had used so much of the preceding 
night for my journey, I remembered the wise 
custom of hot countries and lay down to sleep. 

I slept but a little while, yet when I woke the air 
was cooler. I climbed the side of the glen at 
random, and on the summit I found, to my disgust, 
a road. What road could it be ? To this day I 
do not know. Perhaps I had missed my way and 
struck the main highway again. Perhaps (it is often 
so in the Apennines) it was a road leading nowhere. 
At any rate I hesitated, and looked back to judge 
my direction. 

It was a happy accident. I was now some 2000 
feet above the Taro. There, before me, stood the 
high strange rock that I had watched from below ; 
all around it and below me was the glen or cup of 
bare hills, slabs, and slopes of sand and stone cal- 



THE GREAT VIEW 



337 



cined in the sun, and, beyond these near things, all 
the plain of Lombardy was at my feet. 

It was this which made it worth while to have 
toiled up that steep wall, and even to have lost 




my way — to see a hundred miles of the great flat 
stretched out before me : all the kingdoms of the 
world. 

Nor was this all. There were sharp white clouds 
on the far northern horizon, low down above the 
uncertain edge of the world. I looked again and 
found they did not move. Then I knew they were 
the Alps. 

Believe it or not, I was looking back to a place of 
days before: over how many, many miles of road ! 



338 THE LONELY FORD 

The rare, white peaks and edges could not deceive 
me ; they still stood to the sunlight, and sent me 
from that vast distance the memory of my passage, 
when their snows had seemed interminable and their 
height so monstrous ; their cold such a cloak of 
death. Now they were as far off as childhood, and 
I saw them for the last time. 

All this I drew. Then finding a post directing 
me to a side road for Calestano, I followed it down 
and down into the valley beyond ; and up the walls 
of this second valley as the evening fell I heard 
the noise of the water running, as the Taro had 
run, a net of torrents from the melting snows far 
off. These streams I soon saw below me, winding 
(as those of the Taro had wound) through a floor 
of dry shingle and rock ; but the high hills enclosed 
that trench, and evening had left it in shadow ; and 
when my road ceased suddenly some hundreds of feet 
above the bed of the river, and when, full of evening, 
I had scrambled down through trees to the brink of 
the water, I found I should have to repeat what I 
had done that morning and to ford these streams. 
For there was no track of any kind and no bridge, 
and Calestano stood opposite me, a purple cluster of 
houses in the dusk against the farther mountain-side. 

Very warily, lobbing stones as I had been taught 



ON PRISONS 339 

and following up and down each branch to find a 
place, I forded one by one the six little cold and 
violent rivers, and reaching the farther shore, I 
reached also, as I thought, supper, companionship, 
and a bed. 

But it is not in this simple way that human life 
is arranged. What awaited me in Calestano was 
ill favour, a prison, release, base flattery, and a very 
tardy meal. 

It is our duty to pity all men. It is our duty to 
pity those who are in prison. It is our duty to 
pity those who are not in prison. How much 
more is it the duty of a Christian man to pity 
the rich who cannot ever get into prison ? These 
indeed I do now specially pity, and extend to them 
my commiseration. 

What ! Never even to have felt the grip of 
the policeman ; to have watched his bold suspicious 
eye; to have tried to make a good show under 
examination . . . never to have heard the bolt 
grinding in the lock, and never to have looked 
round at the cleanly simplicity of a cell ? Then 
what emotions have you had, unimprisonable rich ; 
or what do you know of active living and of 
adventure ? 



3 4 o THE ARREST 

It was after drinking some wine and eating 
macaroni and bread at a poor inn, the only one 
in the place, and after having to shout at the ill- 
natured hostess (and to try twenty guesses before 
I made her understand that I wanted cheese), it 
was when I had thus eaten and shouted, and had 
gone over the way to drink coffee and to smoke 
in a little cafe, that my adventure befel me. 

In the inn there had been a fat jolly-looking 
man and two official-looking people with white 
caps dining at another table. I had taken no 
notice of them at the time. But as I sat smoking 
and thinking in the little cafe, which was bright 
and full of people, I noticed a first danger- 
signal when I was told sullenly that " they had 
no bed ; they thought I could get none in the 
town ; " then, suddenly, these two men in white 
caps came in, and they arrested me with as much 
ease as you or I would hold a horse. 

A moment later there came in two magnificent 
fellows, gendarmes, with swords and cocked hats, 
and moustaches a V Abd el Kader, as we used to say 
in the old days ; these four, the two gendarmes and 
the two policemen, sat down opposite me on chairs 
and began cross-questioning me in Italian, a lan- 
guage in which I was not proficient. I so far 



THE POLICEMAN'S LIE 341 

understood them as to know that they were asking 
for my papers. 

" Niente ! " said I, and poured out on the table 
a card-case, a sketch-book, two pencils, a bottle 
of wine, a cup, a piece of bread, a scrap of French 
newspaper, an old Seco/o, a needle, some thread, and 
a flute — but no passport. 

They looked in the card-case and found 73 lira ; 
that is, not quite three pounds. They examined the 
sketch-book critically, as behoved southerners who 
are mostly of an artistic bent : but they found no 
passport. They questioned me again, and as I 
picked about for words to reply, the smaller (the 
policeman, a man with a face like a fox) shouted 
that he had heard me speaking Italian currently in 
the inn, and that my hesitation was a blind. 

This lie so annoyed me that I said angrily in 
French (which I made as southern as possible to 
suit them) : — 

" You lie : and you can be punished for such 
lies, since you are an official." For though the 
police are the same in all countries, and will swear 
black is white, and destroy men for a song, yet 
where there is a droit administratif — that is, where the 
Revolution has made things tolerable — you are 
much surer of punishing your policeman, and he is 



342 THE CELL 

much less able to do you a damage than in England 
or America ; for he counts as an official and is 
under a more public discipline and responsibility it 
he exceeds his powers. 

Then I added, speaking distinctly, " I can speak 
French and Latin. Have you a priest in Calestano, 
and does he know Latin ? " 

This was a fine touch. They winced, and par- 
ried it by saying that the Sindaco knew French. 
Then they led me away to their barracks while 
they fetched the Sindaco, and so I was imprisoned. 

But not for long. Very soon I was again fol- 
lowing up the street, and we came to the house of 
the Sindaco or Mayor. There he was, an old man 
with white hair, God bless him, playing cards with 
his son and daughter. To him therefore, as under- 
standing French, I was bidden address myself. I 
told him in clear and exact idiom that his police- 
men were fools, that his town was a rabbit-warren, 
and his prison the only cleanly thing in it; that half- 
a-dozen telegrams to places I could indicate would 
show where I had passed ; that I was a common 
tourist, not even an artist (as my sketch-book 
showed), and that my cards gave my exact address 
and description. 

But the Sindaco, the French-speaking Sindaco, 



THE BILINGUAL MAYOR 343 

understood me not in the least, and it seemed a 
wicked thing in me to expose him in his old age, so 
I waited till he spoke. He spoke a word common 
to all languages, and one he had just caught 
from my lips. 

" Tourist-e ? " he said. 

I nodded. Then he told them to let me go. It 
was as simple as that ; and to this day, I suppose, 
he passes for a very bilingual Mayor. He did me 
a service, and I am willing to believe that in his 
youth he smacked his lips over the subtle flavour of 
Voltaire, but I fear to-day he would have a poor 
time with Anatole France. 

What a contrast was there between the hour 
when I had gone out of the cafe a prisoner and 
that when I returned rejoicing with a crowd about 
me, proclaiming my innocence, and shouting one to 
another that I was a tourist and had seventy-three 
lira on my person ! The landlady smiled and bowed : 
she had before refused me a bed ! The men at the 
tables made me a god ! Nor did I think them 
worse for this. Why should I ? A man unknown, 
unkempt, unshaven, in tatters, covered with weeks 
of travel and mud, and in a suit that originally 
cost not ten shillings ; having slept in leaves and 
ferns, and forest places, crosses a river at dusk 



344 THE MORNING VALLEY 

and enters a town furtively, not by the road. He is 
a foreigner; he carries a great club. Is it not much 
wiser to arrest such a man ? Why yes, evidently. 
And when you have arrested him, can you do more 
than let him go without proof, on his own word ? 
Hardly ! 

Thus I loved the people of Calestano, especially 
for this strange adventure they had given me ; and 
next day, having slept in a human room, I went at 
sunrise up the mountain sides beyond and above 
their town, and so climbed by a long cleft the 
second spur of the Apennines : the spur that sepa- 
rated me from the third river, the Parma. And my 
goal above the Parma (when I should have crossed 
it) was a place marked in the map " Tizzano." 
To climb this second spur, to reach and cross the 
Parma in the vale below, to find Tizzano, I left 
Calestano on that fragrant morning ; and having 
passed and drawn a little hamlet called Frangi, 
standing on a crag, I went on up the steep vale and 
soon reached the top of the ridge, which here dips 
a little and allows a path to cross over to the 
southern side. 

It is the custom of many, when they get over a 
ridge, to begin singing. Nor did I fail, early as 



THE PEASANT 



345 



was the hour, to sing in passing this the second 
of my Apennine summits. I sang easily with an 
open throat everything that I could remember in 
praise of joy ; and I did not spare the choruses of 
my songs, being even at pains to imitate (when they 
were double) the various voices of either part. 

Now, so much of the Englishman was in me 
that, coming round a corner of rock from which 
one first sees Beduzzo hanging on its ledge (as you 
know), and finding round this corner a peasant 
sitting at his ease, I was ashamed. For I did not 
like to be overheard singing fantastic songs. But 
he, used to singing as a solitary pastime, greeted me, 
and we walked along together, pointing out to each 
other the glories of the world before us and exult- 
ing in the morning. It was his business to show me 








things and their names : the great Mountain of the 
Pilgrimage to the South, the strange rock of Castel 



346 THE MOUNTAIN SPEECH 

Nuovo : in the far haze the plain of Parma; and 
Tizzano on its high hill, the ridge straight before 
me. He also would tell me the name in Italian 
of the things to hand — my boots, my staff, my 
hat; and I told him their names in French, all 
of which he was eager to learn. 

We talked of the way people here tilled and 
owned ground, of the dangers in the hills, and of 
the happiness of lonely men. But if you ask how 
we understood each other, I will explain the matter 
to you. 

In Italy, in the Apennines of the north, there 
seem to be three strata of language. In the valleys 
the Italian was pure, resonant, and foreign to me. 
There dwell the townsmen, and they deal down 
river with the plains. Half-way up (as at Frangi, 
at Beduzzo, at Tizzano) I began to understand 
them. They have the nasal " n " ; they clip their 
words. On the summits, at last, they speak like 
northerners, and I was easily understood, for they 
said not " vino," but " vin " ; not " duo" but " du" 
and so forth. They are the Gauls of the hills. I 
told them so, and they were very pleased. 

Then I and my peasant parted, but as one should 
never leave a man without giving him something to 
show by way of token on the Day of Judgment, I 



" MOLINAR " 347 

gave this man a little picture of Milan, and bade 
him keep it for my sake. 

So he went his way, and I mine, and the last 
thing he said to me was about a " molinar" but I 
did not know what that meant. 

When I had taken a cut down the mountain, and 
discovered a highroad at the bottom, I saw that 
the river before me needed fording, like all the 
rest ; and as my map showed me there was no 
bridge for many miles down, I cast about to cross 
directly, if possible on some man's shoulders. 

I met an old woman with a heap of grass on her 
back ; I pointed to the river, and said (in Lingua 
Franca) that I wished to cross. She again used that 
word " molinar" and I had an inkling that it meant 
" miller." I said to myself — 

" Where there is a miller there is a mill. For 
Ubi Petrus ibi Ecclesia. Where there is a mill 
there is water ; a mill must have motive power : 
.'. (a) I must get near the stream ; (b) I must look 
out for the noise and aspect of a mill." 

I therefore (thanking the grass-bearing woman) 
went right over the fields till I saw a great, slow 
mill-wheel against a house, and a sad man standing 
looking at it as though it were the Procession of 



348 HE IS FOUND 

God's Providence. He was thinking of many 
things. I tapped him on the shoulder (whereat 
he started) and spoke the great word of that valley, 
" molinar." It opened all the gates of his soul. He 
smiled at me like a man grown young again, and, 
beckoning me to follow, led radiantly up the sluice 
to where it drew from the river. 

Here three men were at work digging a better 
entry for the water. One was an old, happy man 
in spectacles, the second a young man with stilts 
in his hands, the third was very tall and narrow ; 
his face was sad, and he was of the kind that endure 
all things and conquer. I said " Molinar ? " I had 
found him. 

To the man who had brought me I gave 50 c, 
and so innocent and good are these people that he 
said " Pourquoi? " or words like it, and I said it 
was necessary. Then I said to the molinar, 
" ghianto ? " and he, holding up a tall finger, said 
" Una Lira." The young man leapt on to his 
stilts, the molinar stooped down and I got upon 
his shoulders, and we all attempted the many 
streams of the river Parma, in which I think I 
should by myself have drowned. 

I say advisedly — "I should have been drowned." 
These upper rivers of the hills run high and low 



AND SERVES 349 

according to storms and to the melting of the 
snows. The river of Parma (for this torrent at 
last fed Parma) was higher than the rest. 

Even the molinar, the god of that valley, had to 
pick his way carefully, and the young man on stilts 
had to go before, much higher than mortal men, 
and up above the water. I could see him as he 
went, and I could see that, to tell the truth, there 
was a ford — a rare thing in upper waters, because 
in the torrent-sources of rivers either the upper 
waters run over changeless rocks or else over 
gravel and sand. Now if they run over rocks they 
have their isolated shallow places, which any man 
may find, and their deep — evident by the still and 
mysterious surface, where fish go round and round 
in the hollows ; but no true ford continuous from 
side to side. So it is in Scotland. And if they 
run over gravel and sand, then with every storm or 
" spate " they shift and change. But here by some 
accident there ran — perhaps a shelf of rock, perhaps 
a ruin of a Roman bridge — something at least that 
was deep enough and solid enough to be a true ford 
— and that we followed. 

The molinar — even the molinar — was careful of 
his way. Twice he waited, waist high, while the 
man on stilts before us suddenly lost ground and 



3S o ANDIAMO 

plunged to his feet. Once, crossing a small branch 
(for the river here, like all these rivers, runs in many 
arms over the dry gravel), it seemed there was no 
foothold and we had to cast up and down. When- 
ever we found dry land, I came off the molinar's 
back to rest him, and when he took the water 
again I mounted again. So we passed the many 
streams, and stood at last on the Tizzanian side. 
Then I gave a lira to the molinar, and to his com- 
panion on stilts 50 c, who said, " What is this 
for? " and I said, "You also helped." 

The molinar then, with gesticulations and ex- 
pression of the eyes, gave me to understand that 
for this 50 c. the stilt-man would take me up to 
Tizzano on the high ridge and show me the path 
up the ridge ; so the stilt-man turned to me and 
said, " Andiamo" which means " A/Ions.' 7 But when 
the Italians say " Andlamo " they are less harsh than 
the northern French who say " Allons " ; for the 
northern French have three troubles in the blood. 
They are fighters ; they will for ever be seeking the 
perfect state, and they love furiously. Hence they 
ferment twice over, like wine subjected to move- 
ment and breeding acidity. Therefore is it that 
when they say " Allons" it is harsher than "Andiamo." 
My Italian said to me genially, " Andiamo." 



THEOLOGICAL DIGRESSION 351 

The Catholic Church makes men. By which I do 
not mean boasters and swaggerers, nor bullies nor 
ignorant fools, who, finding themselves comfortable, 
think that their comfort will be a boon to others, 
and attempt (with singular unsuccess) to force it on 
the world ; but men, human beings, different from 
the beasts, capable of firmness and discipline and 
recognition ; accepting death ; tenacious. Of her 
effects the most gracious is the character of the 
Irish and of these Italians. Of such also some 
day she may make soldiers. 

Have you ever noticed that all the Catholic 
Church does is thought beautiful and lovable until 
she comes out into the open, and then suddenly she 
is found by her enemies (which are the seven capital 
sins, and the four sins calling to heaven for ven- 
geance) to be hateful and grinding ? So it is ; and 
it is the fine irony of her present renovation that 
those who were for ever belauding her pictures, and 
her saints, and her architecture, as we praise things 
dead, they are the most angered by her appearance 
on this modern field all armed, just as she was, with 
works and art and songs, sometimes superlative, 
often vulgar. Note you, she is still careless of art 
or songs, as she has always been. She lays her 
foundations in something other, which something 



352 THE MANY BEASTS 

other our moderns hate. Yet out of that some- 
thing other came the art and song of the Middle 
Ages. And what art or songs have you ? She is 
Europe and all our past. She is returning. Andiamo. 

Lector. But Mr. {deleted by the Censor) does not 
think so ? 

Auctor. I last saw him supping at the Savoy. 
Andiamo. 

We went up the hill together over a burnt land, 
but shaded with trees. It was very hot. I could 
scarcely continue, so fast did my companion go, 
and so much did the heat oppress me. 

We passed a fountain at which oxen drank, and 
there I supped up cool water from the spout, but he 
wagged his finger before his face to tell me that this 
was an error under a hot sun. 

We went on and met two men driving cattle up 
the path between the trees. These I soon found to 
be talking of prices and markets with my guide. For 
it was market-day. As we came up at last on to the 
little town — a little, little town like a nest, and all 
surrounded with walls, and a castle in it and a 
church — we found a thousand beasts all lowing 
and answering each other along the highroad, and 
on into the market square through the gate. There 



THE BARGAIN 353 

my guide led me into a large room, where a great 
many peasants were eating soup with macaroni in it, 
and some few, meat. But I was too exhausted to 
eat meat, so I supped up my broth and then began 
diapephradizing on my fingers to show the great 
innkeeper what I wanted. 

I first pulled up the macaroni out of the dish, and 
said, FromagiOy Pommodoro, by which I meant cheese 
— tomato. He then said he knew what I meant, 
and brought me that spaghetti so treated, which 
is a dish for a king, a cosmopolitan traitor, an 
oppressor of the poor, a usurer, or any other rich 
man, but there is no spaghetti in the place to which 
such men go, whereas these peasants will continue 
to enjoy it in heaven. 

I then pulled out my bottle of wine, drank what 
was left out of the neck (by way of sign), and 
putting it down said, <c Tale, tantum, vino rosso." 
My guide also said many things which probably 
meant that I was a rich man, who threw his money 
about by the sixpence. So the innkeeper went 
through a door and brought back a bottle all 
corked and sealed, and said on his fingers, and with 
his mouth and eyes, "This kind of wine is some- 
thing VERY SPECIAL." 

Only in the foolish cities do men think it a fine 

23 



354 THE BARGAIN 

thing to appear careless of money. So I, very 
narrowly watching him out of half-closed eves, 
held up my five fingers interrogatively, and said, 
" Cinquante ? ' meaning " Dare you ask. five- 
pence ? " 

At which he and all the peasants around, even 
including my guide, laughed aloud as at an excel- 
lent joke, and said, " Cinquante, Hoi hoi " and dug 
each other in the ribs. But the innkeeper of 
Tizzano Val Parmense said in Italian a number 
of things which meant that I could but be joking, 
and added (in passing) that a lira made it a kind of 
gift to me. A lira was, as it were, but a token to 
prove that it had changed hands : a registration fee : 
a matter of record ; at a lira it was pure charity. 
Then I said, " Soixante Dix ? " which meant nothing 
to him, so I held up seven fingers ; he waved his 
hand about genially, and said that as I was evidently 
a good fellow, a traveller, and as anyhow he was 
practically giving me the wine, he would make it 
ninepence ; it was hardly worth his while to stretch 
out his hand for so little money. So then I pulled 
out 80 c. in coppers, and said, " Tutto" which means 
" all." Then he put the bottle before me, took the 
money, and an immense clamour rose from all 
those who had been watching the scene, and they 



THE CORKSCREW 355 

applauded it as a ratified bargain. And this is the 
way in which bargains were struck of old time in 
these hills when your fathers and mine lived and 
shivered in a cave, hunted wolves, and bargained with 
clubs only. 

So this being settled, and I eager for the wine, 
wished it to be opened, especially to stand drink to 
my guide. The innkeeper was in another room. 
The guide was too courteous to ask for a corkscrew, 
and I did not know the Italian for a corkscrew. 

I pointed to the cork, but all I got out of 
my guide was a remark that the wine was very 
good. Then I made the emblem and sign of a 
corkscrew in my sketch-book with a pencil, but he 
pretended not to understand — such was his breeding. 
Then I imitated the mode, sound, and gesture of 
a corkscrew entering a cork, and an old man next 
to me said " Tira-buchon " — a common French 
word as familiar as the woods of Marly ! It was 
brought. The bottle was opened and we all drank 
together. 

As I rose to go out of Tizzano Val Parmense 
my guide said to me, " Se chiama Tira-Buchon 
perche E tira il buchon." And I said to him, 
" Dominus Vobiscum" and left him to his hills. 

I took the road downwards from the ridge into 



3S 6 



TIZZANO 



the next dip and valley, but after a mile or so 
in the great heat (it was now one o'clock) I was 
exhausted. So I went up into a little wooded 




bank, and lay there in the shade sketching Tiz- 
zano Val Parmense, where it stood not much above 
me, and then I lay down and slept for an hour and 
smoked a pipe and thought of many things. 



From the ridge on which Tizzano stands, which 
is the third of these Apennine spurs, to the next, 
the fourth, is but a little way; one looks across from 
one to the other. Nevertheless it is a difficult piece of 
walking, because in the middle of the valley another 
ridge, almost as high as the principal spurs, runs 
down, and this has to be climbed at its lowest part 
before one can get down to the torrent of the Enza, 
where it runs with a hollow noise in the depths of 



THE TOWER OF RUGINO 357 

the mountains. So the whole valley looks confused, 
and it appears, and is, laborious. 

Very high up above in a mass of trees stood the 
first of those many ruined towers and 

castles in which the Apennines abound, ^ J&'" 

and of which Canossa, far off and in- Jy/ 

distinguishable in the haze, was the chief 
example. It was called " The Tower of 
Rugino." Beyond the deep trench of the Enza, 
poised as it seemed on its southern bank (but really 
much further off, in the Secchia valley), stood that 
strange high rock of Castel-Nuovo, which the 
peasant had shown me that morning and which 
was the landmark of this attempt. It seemed made 
rather by man than by nature, so square and exact 
was it and so cut off from the other hills. 

It was not till the later afternoon when the air 
was already full of the golden dust that comes 
before the fall of the evening, that I stood above 
the Enza and saw it running thousands of feet 
below. Here I halted for a moment irresolute and 
looked at the confusion of the hills. It had been 
my intention to make a straight line for Collagna, 
but I could not tell where Collagna lay save that 
it was somewhere behind the high mountain that 
was now darkening against the sky. Moreover the 



3S8 



THE CROSSING OF 



Enza (as I could see down, down from where I stood ) 
was not fordable. It did not run in streams but in 
one full current, and was a true river. All the scene 
was wild. I had come close to the central ridge ot the 
Apennines. It stood above me but five or six clear 
miles away, and on its slopes there were patches and 
fields of snow which were beginning to glimmer in 
the diminishing light. 

Four peasants sat on the edge of the road. They 
were preparing to go to their quiet homesteads, and 
they were gathering their scythes together, for thev 
had been mowing in a field. Coming up to these, I 
asked them how I might reach Collagna. They 
told me that I could not go straight, as I had 

wished, on account 
- of the impassable 
river, but that if I 
went down the steep 
directly below me I 
should find a bridge; 
that thence a path 
went up the oppo- 
site ridge to where 
a hamlet, called Cer- 
egio (which they showed me beyond the vallev), 
stood in trees on the crest, and once there (they 




THE ENZA 359 

said) I could be further directed. I understood all 
their speech except one fatal word. I thought they 
told me that Ceregio was half the way to Collagna ; 
and what that error cost me you shall hear. 

They drank my wine, I ate their bread, and we 
parted : they to go to their accustomed place, and I 
to cross this unknown valley. But when I had left 
these grave and kindly men, the echo of their 
voices remained with me ; the deep valley of the 
Enza seemed lonely, and as I went lower and lower 
down towards the noise of the river I lost the 
sun. 

The Enza was flooded. A rough bridge, made 
of stout logs resting on trunks of trees that were 
lashed together like tri- 
pods and supported a 
long plank, was afforded 
to cross it. But in the 
high water it did not quite 
reach to the hither bank. 
I rolled great stones into 
the water and made a short 
causeway, and so, some- 
what perilously, I attained 
the farther shore, and went up, up by a little pre- 
cipitous path till I reached the hamlet of Ceregio 




3 6o CEREGIO 

standing on its hill, blessed and secluded ; for no 
road leads in or out of it, but only mule paths. 

The houses were all grouped together round a 
church ; it was dim between them ; but several 
men driving oxen took me to a house that was 
perhaps the inn, though there was no sign ; and 
there in a twilight room we all sat down together like 
Christians in perfect harmony, and the woman of 
the house served us. 

Now when, after this Communion, I asked the 
way to Collagna, they must have thought me 
foolish, and have wondered why I did not pass 
the night with them, for they knew how far off 
Collagna was. But I (by the error in language 
of which I have told you) believed it to be but a 
short way off. It was in reality ten miles. The 
oldest of my' companions said he would put me 
on the way. 

We went together in the half light by a lane that 
followed the crest of the hill, and we passed a 
charming thing, a little white sculpture in relief, 
set up for a shrine and representing the Annun- 
ciation ; and as we passed it we both smiled. Then 
in a few hundred yards we passed another that was 
the Visitation, and they were gracious and beautiful 
to a degree, and I saw that they stood for the five 



THE SHRINES 361 

joyful mysteries. Then he had to leave me, and 
he said, pointing to the little shrine : — 

" When you come to the fifth of these the path 
divides. Take that to the left, and follow it round 
the hollow of the mountain : it will become a lane. 
This lane crosses a stream and passes near a tower. 
When you have reached the tower it joins a great 
highroad, and that is the road to Collagna." 

And when he indicated the shrines he smiled, as 
though in apology for them, and I saw that we were 
of the same religion. Then (since people who will 
not meet again should give each other presents 
mutually) I gave him the best of my two pipes, a 
new pipe with letters carved on it, which he took 
to be the initials of my name, and he on his part 
gave me a hedge-rose which he had plucked and 
had been holding in his fingers. And I continued 
the path alone. 

Certainly these people have a benediction upon 
them, granted them for their simple lives and their 
justice. Their eyes are fearless and kindly. They 
are courteous, straight, and all have in them laughter 
and sadness. They are full of songs, of memories, 
of the stories of their native place ; and their worship 
is conformable to the world that God made. May 



362 THE NIGHT BEGINS 

they possess their own land, and may their influence 
come again from Italy to save from jar, and boast- 
ing, and ineptitude the foolish, valourless cities, 

and the garish crowds of shouting men And 

let us especially pray that the revival of the faith 
may do something for our poor old universities. 

Already, when I had heard all these directions, 
they seemed to argue a longer road than I had ex- 
pected. It proved interminable. 

It was now fully dark ; the night was very cold 
from the height of the hills ; a dense dew began to 
fall upon the ground, and the sky was full of stars. 
For hours I went on slowly down the lane that ran 
round the hollow of the wooded mountain, won- 
dering why I did not reach the stream he spoke of. 
It was midnight when I came to the level, and yet 
I heard no water, and did not yet see the tower 
against the sky. Extreme fatigue made it impos- 
sible, as I thought, to proceed farther, when I saw 
a light in a window, and went to it quickly and 
stood beneath it. A woman from the window called 
me Caro mio, which was gracious, but she would 
not let me sleep even in the straw of the barn. 

I hobbled on in despair of the night, for the 
necessity of sleep was weighing me down after four 



THE DESPAIR OF THE NIGHT 3 6 3 

high hills climbed that day, and after the rough 
ways and the heat and the continual marching. 

I found a bridge which crossed the deep ravine 
they had told me of. This high bridge was new, and 
had been built of fine stone, yet it was broken and 
ruined, and a gap suddenly showed in the dark. 
I stepped back from it in fear. The clambering 
down to the stream and up again through the 
briars to regain the road broke me yet more, 
and when, on the hill beyond, I saw the tower 
faintly darker against the dark sky, I went up 
doggedly to it, fearing faintness, and reaching it 
where it stood (it was on the highest ground 
overlooking the Secchia valley), I sat down on 
a stone beside it and waited for the morning. 

The long slope of the hills fell away for miles 
to where, by daylight, would have lain the misty 
plain of Emilia. The darkness confused the land- 
scape. The silence of the mountains and the awful 
solemnity of the place lent that vast panorama 
a sense of the terrible, under the dizzy roof of the 
stars. Every now and again some animal of the 
night gave a cry in the undergrowth of the valley, 
and the great rock of Castel-Nuovo, now close 
and enormous — bare, rugged, a desert place — 
added something of doom. 



364 THE LAST HOURS 

The hours were creeping on with the less certain 
stars ; a very faint and unliving grey touched the 
edges of the clouds. The cold possessed me, and 
I rose to walk, if I could walk, a little farther. 

What is that in the mind which, after (it 
may be) a slight disappointment or a pettv ac- 
cident, causes it to suffer on the scale of grave 
things ? 

I have waited for the dawn a hundred times, 
attended by that mournful, colourless spirit which 
haunts the last hours of darkness ; and influenced 
especially bv the great timeless apathy that hangs 
round the first uncertain promise of increasing light. 
For there is an hour before daylight when men die, 
and when there is nothing above the soul or around 
it, when even the stars fail. And this long and 
dreadful expectation I had thought to be worst 
when one was alone at sea in a small boat without 
wind ; drifting beyond one's harbour in the ebb of 
the outer channel tide, and sogging back at the 
first flow on the broad, confused movement of a sea 
without any waves. In such lonely mornings I have 
watched the Owers light turning, and I have counted 
up my gulf of time, and wondered that moments 
could be so stretched out in the clueless mind. I 
have prayed for the morning or for a little draught 



THE END OF DARKNESS 



36$ 



of wind, and this I have thought, I say, the extreme 
of absorption into emptiness and longing. 




But now, on this ridge, dragging myself on to the 
main road, I found a deeper abyss of isolation and 
despairing fatigue than I had ever known, and I 
came near to turning eastward and imploring the 
hastening of light, as men pray continually without 
reason for things that can but come in a due order. 
I still went forward a little, because when I sat 
down my loneliness oppressed me like a misfortune ; 
and because my feet, going painfully and slowly, 
yet gave a little balance and rhythm to the move- 
ment of my mind. 

I heard no sound of animals or birds. I 
passed several fields, deserted in the half-darkness ; 
and in some I felt the hay, but always found it 



366 IT DAWNS 

wringing wet with dew, nor could I discover a 
good shelter from the wind that blew off the 
upper snow of the summits. For a little space of 
time there fell upon me, as I crept along the road, 
that shadow of sleep which numbs the mind, but it 
could not compel me to lie down, and I accepted 
it only as a partial and beneficent oblivion which 
covered my desolation and suffering as a thin, 
transparent cloud may cover an evil moon. 

Then suddenly the sky grew lighter upon every 
side. That cheating gloom (which I think the 
clouds in purgatory must reflect) lifted from the 
valley as though to a slow order given by some 
calm and good influence that was marshalling in 
the day. Their colours came back to things; the 
trees recovered their shape, life and trembling ; 
here and there, on the face of the mountain oppo- 
site, the mists by their movement took part in the 
new life, and I thought I heard for the first time 
the tumbling water far below me in the ravine. 
That subtle barrier was drawn which marks to-dav 
from yesterday; all the night and its despondency 
became the past and entered memory. The road 
before me, the pass on my left (my last ridge, and 
the entry into Tuscany), the mass of the great 
hills, had become mixed into the increasing light, 



THE SUN! 367 

that is, into the familiar and invigorating Present 
which I have always found capable of opening 
the doors of the future with a gesture of victory. 

My pain either left me, or I ceased to notice 
it, and seeing a little way before me a bank above 
the road, and a fine grove of sparse and dominant 
chestnuts, I climbed up thither and turned, standing 
to the east. 

There, without any warning of colours, or of the 
heraldry that we have in the north, the sky was a 
great field of pure light, and without doubt it was 
all woven through, as was my mind watching it, 
with security and gladness. Into this field, as I 
watched it, rose the sun. 

The air became warmer almost suddenly. The 
splendour and health of the new day left me 
all in repose, and persuaded or compelled me to 
immediate sleep. 

I found therefore in the short grass, and on 
the scented earth beneath one of my trees, a 
place for lying down ; I stretched myself out 
upon it, and lapsed into a profound slumber, 
which nothing but a vague and tenuous delight 
separated from complete forgetfulness. If the last 
confusion of thought, before sleep possessed me, was 
a kind of prayer' — and certainly I was in the mood 



368 THE PASS 

of gratitude and of adoration — this prayer was of 
course to God, from whom every good proceeds, but 
partly (idolatrously) to the Sun, which, of all the 
things He has made, seems, of what we at least can 
discover, the most complete and glorious. 

Therefore the first hours of the sunlight, after 
I had wakened, made the place like a new country ; 
for my mind which received it was new. I reached 
Collagna before the great heat, following the fine 
highroad that went dipping and rising again along 
the mountain side, and then (leaving the road and 
crossing the little Secchia by a bridge), a path, soon 
lost in a grassy slope, gave me an indication of my 
way. For when I had gone an hour or so upwards 
along the shoulder of the hill, there opened gradually 
before me a silent and profound vale, hung with 
enormous woods, and sloping upwards to where it 
was closed by a high bank beneath and between two 
peaks. This bank I knew could be nothing else 
than the central ridge of the Apennines, the water- 
shed, the boundary of Tuscany, and the end of 
all the main part of my journey. Beyond, the 
valleys would open on to the Tuscan Plain, and 
at the southern limit of that, Siena was my mark ; 
from Siena to Rome an eager man, if he is sound, 
may march in three long days. Nor was that 



INTO TUSCANY 369 

calculation all. The satisfaction of the last lap, of 
the home run, went with the word Tuscany in my 
mind ; these cities were the approaches and intro- 
duction of the end. 

When I had slept out the heat, I followed the 
woods upward through the afternoon. They stood 
tangled and huge, and the mosses under them were 
thick and silent, because in this last belt of the 
mountains height and coolness reproduced the 
north. A charcoal burner was making his fur- 
nace ; after that for the last miles there was no 
sound. Even the floor of the vale was a depth 
of grass, and no torrent ran in it but only a little 
hidden stream, leafy like our streams at home. 

At last the steep bank, a wall at the end of the 
valley, rose immediately above me. It was very steep 
and bare, desolate with the many stumps of trees 
that had been cut down ; but all its edge and 
fringe against the sky was the line of a deep forest. 

After its laborious hundreds of feet, when the forest 
that crowned it evenly was reached, the Apennines 
were conquered, the last great range was passed, 
and there stood no barrier between this high crest 
and Rome. 

The hither side of that bank, I say, had been 
denuded of its trees ; the roots of secular chestnuts 

24 



370 THE FURTHER SIDE 

stood like graves above the dry steep, and had marked 
my last arduous climb. Now, at the summit, 
the highest part was a line of cool forest, and 
the late afternoon mingled with the sanctity of 
trees. A genial dampness pervaded the earth 
beneath ; grasses grew, and there were living 
creatures in the shade. 

Nor was this tenanted wood all the welcome 
I received on my entry into Tuscany. Already I 
heard the noise of falling waters upon every side, 
where the Serchio sprang from twenty sources on 
the southern slope, and leapt down between mosses, 
and quarrelled, and overcame great smooth dark 
rocks in busy falls. Indeed, it was like my own 
country in the north, and a man might say to 
himself — "After so much journeying, perhaps I 
am in the Enchanted Wood, and may find at 
last the fairy Melisaunde." 

A glade opened and, the trees no longer hiding 
it, I looked down the vale, which was the gate of 
Tuscany. There — high, jagged, rapt into the 
sky — stood such a group of mountains as men 
dream of in good dreams, or see in the works of 
painters when old age permits them revelations. 
Their height was evident from the faint mist and 
grey of their hues ; their outline was tumultuous, 



THE DESCENT 



37i 



yet balanced : full of accident and poise. It was as 
though these high walls of Carrara, the western 




boundary of the valley, had been shaped expressly 
for man, in order to exalt him with unexpected and 
fantastic shapes, and to expand his dull life with a 
permanent surprise. For a long time I gazed at 
these great hills. 

Then, more silent in the mind through their 
influence, I went down past the speech and com- 
panionship of the springs of the Serchio, and the 
chestnut trees were redolent of evening all around. 
Down the bank to where the streams met in one, 
down the river, across its gaping, ruinous bridge 
(which some one, generations ago, had built for 
the rare travellers — there were then no main roads 



37 2 SILLANO 

across the Apennine, and perhaps this rude pass was 
in favour); down still more gently through the 
narrow upper valley I went between the chestnut 
trees, and calm went with me for a companion : and 
the love of men and the expectation of good 
seemed natural to all that had been made in this 
blessed place. Of Borda, where the peasants directed 
me, there is no need to speak, till crossing the 
Serchio once more, this time on a trestle bridge 
of wood, I passed by a wider path through the 
groves, and entered the dear village of Sillano, which 
looks right into the pure west. And the peaks are 
guardians all about it : the elder brothers of this 
remote and secluded valley. 

An inn received me : a great kitchen full of men 
and women talking, a supper preparing, a great fire, 
meat smoking and drying in the ingle-nook, a vast 
timbered roof going up into darkness : there I was 
courteously received, but no one understood my 
language. Seeing there a young priest, I said to 
him — 

" Pater, habeo linguam latinam, sed non habeo 
linguam Italicam. Visne mi dare traduction em in 
is tarn linguam Toscanam non nullorum verborum ?" 

To this he replied, " Libenter," and the people 
revered us both. Thus he told me the name for a 



THE TRANSFIGURED VALLEY 373 

knife was cultello ; for a room, camera por dormire ; 
for " what is it called ? " " come si chiama ? " ; for 
" what is the road to ? " " quella e la via a . . . ? " 
and other phrases wherein, no doubt, I am wrong ; 
but I only learnt by ear. 

Then he said to me something I did not under- 
stand, and I answered, " Pol-Hercle ! " at which he 
seemed pleased enough. 

Then, to make conversation, I said, " Diaconus 
est" 

And he answered me, mildly and gravely, "Pres- 
byter sum." 

And a little while after he left for his house, but 
I went out on to the balcony, where men and women 
were talking in subdued tones. There, alone, I sat 
and watched the night coming up into these Tuscan 
hills. The first moon since that waning in Lorraine — 
(how many nights ago, how many marches !) — hung 
in the sky, a full crescent, growing into bright- 
ness and glory as she assumed her reign. The one 
star of the west called out his silent companions in 
their order; the mountains merged into a fainter 
confusion : heaven and the infinite air became the 
natural seat of any spirit that watched this spell. 
The fire-flies darted in the depths of vineyards and 
of trees below ; then the noise of the grasshoppers 



374 ON YOUTH 

brought back suddenly the gardens of home, and 
whatever benediction surrounds our childhood. 
Some promise of eternal pleasures and of rest de- 
served haunted the village of Sillano. 

In very early youth the soul can still remember 
its immortal habitation, and clouds and the edges 
of hills are of another kind from ours, and every 
scent and colour has a savour of Paradise. What 
that quality may be no language can tell, nor have 
men made any words, no, nor any music, to recall 
it — only in a transient way and elusive the recol- 
lection of what youth was, and purity, flashes on us 
in phrases of the poets, and is gone before we can 
fix it in our minds — oh! my friends, if we could 
but recall it ! Whatever those sounds may be that 
are beyond our sounds, and whatever are those keen 
lives which remain alive there under memory — 
whatever is Youth — Youth came up that valley at 
evening, borne upon a southern air. If we deserve 
or attain beatitude, such things shall at last be our 
settled state; and their now sudden influence upon 
the soul in short ecstasies is the proof that they 
stand outside time, and are not subject to decay. 

This, then, was the blessing of Sillano, and here 
was perhaps the highest moment of those seven 



SUDDEN EXCURSION 375 

hundred miles — or more. Do not therefore be 
astonished, reader, if I now press on much more 
hurriedly to Rome, for the goal is almost between 
my hands, and the chief moment has been enjoyed, 
until I shall see the City. 

Now I cry out and deplore me that this next 
sixty miles of way, but especially the heat of the 
days and the dank, mists of the night, should have 
to be told as of a real journey in this very repe- 
titive and sui-similar world. How much rather I 
wish that being free from mundane and wide-awake 
(that is to say, from perilously dusty) considerations 
and droughty boredoms, I might wander forth at 
leisure through the air and visit the regions where 
everything is as the soul chooses : to be dropped at 
last in the ancient and famous town of Siena, whence 
comes that kind of common brown paint wherewith 
men, however wicked, can produce (if they have but 
the art) very surprising effects of depth in painting: 
for so I read of it in a book by a fool, at six shillings, 
and even that was part of a series : but if you wish 
to know anything further of the matter, go you and 
read it, for I will do nothing of the kind. 

Oh to be free for strange voyages even for a 
little while ! I am tired of the road ; and so are 



376 ON ANYTHING 

you, and small blame to you. Your fathers also 
tired of the treadmill, and mine of the conquering 
marches of the Republic. Heaven bless you all ! 

But I say that if it were not for the incredulity 
and doubt and agnostico-schismatical hesitation, and 
very cumbersome air of questioning-and-peering- 
about, which is the bane of our moderns, very 
certainly I should now go on to tell of giants as big 
as cedars, living in mountains of precious stones, and 
drawn to battle by dragons in cars of gold ; or of 
towns where the customs of men were remote and 
unexpected ; of countries not yet visited, and of the 
gods returning. For though it is permissible, and 
a pleasant thing (as Bacon says), to mix a little 
falsehood with one's truth (so St. Louis mixed 
water with his wine, and so does Sir John Growl 
mix vinegar with his, unless I am greatly mistaken, 
for if not, how does he give it that taste at his 
dinners ? eh ? There, I think, is a question that 
would puzzle him !) yet is it much more delectable, 
and far worthier of the immortal spirit of man to 
soar into the empyrean of pure lying — that is, to 
lay the bridle on the neck of Pegasus and let him 
go forward, while in the saddle meanwhile one sits 
well back, grips with the knee, takes the race, and 
on the energy of that steed visits the wheeling stars. 



YHE GARFAGNANA 377 

This much, then, is worth telling of the valley of 
the Serchio, that it is narrow, garrulous with water 
brawling, wooded densely, and contained by fan- 
tastic mountains. That it has a splendid name, 
like the clashing of cymbals — Garfagnana ; that it 
leads to the Tuscan plain, and that it is over a day's 
march long. Also, it is an oven. 

Never since the early liars first cooked eggs in 
the sand was there such heat, and it was made hotter 
by the consciousness of folly, than which there is no 
more heating thing ; for I think that not old Cham- 
pionnet himself, with his Division of Iron, that 
fought one to three and crushed the aged enormities 
of the oppressors as we would crush an empty 
egg, and that found the summer a good time for 
fighting in Naples, I say that he himself would not 
have marched men up the Garfagnana in such a sun. 
Folly planned it, Pride held to it, and the devils 
lent their climate. Garfagnana ! Garfagnana ! to 
have such a pleasant name, and to be what you are ! 

Not that there were not old towers on the steep 
woods of the Apennine, nor glimpses of the higher 
peaks ; towns also : one castle surrounded by a fringe 
of humble roofs — there were all these things. But it 
was an oven. So imagine me, after having passed 
chapels built into rocks, and things most curious, 



37§ 



THE BRIDGES 



but the whole under the strain of an intolerable sun, 
coming, something after midday, to a place called 
Castel-Nuovo, the first town, for Campogiamo is 
hardly a town. 




Mm 




At Castel-Nuovo I sat upon a bridge and thought, 
not what good men think (there came into my 
memory no historical stuff; for all I know, Liberty 
never went by that valley in arms) ; no appreciation 
of beauty filled me ; I was indifferent to all save the 
intolerable heat, when I suddenly recognised the enor- 
mous number of bridges that bespattered the town. 



OF CASTEL-NUOVO 



379 



"This is an odd thing," I mused. "Here is a 
little worriment of a town up in the hills, and what 
» powerful lot of bridges ! " 

I cared not a fig for the thousand things I had 
been told to expect in Tuscany ; everything is in a 
mind, and as they were not in my mind they did 




not exist. But the bridges, they indeed were worthy 
of admiration ! 

Here was a horrible little place on a torrent bank. 



380 THE BRIDGE-GOD 

One bridge was reasonable, for by it went the road 
leading south to Lucca and to Rome ; it was com- 
mon honour to let men escape. But as I sat on 
that main bridge I counted seven others ; indeed 
there must have been a worship of a bridge-god 
some time or other to account for such a necklace 
of bridges in such a neglected borough. 

You may say (I am off hard on the road to Borgo, 
drooping with the heat, but still going strongly), you 
may say that is explicable enough. First a thing is 
useful, you say, then it has to become routine ; then 
the habit, being a habit, gets a sacred idea attached 
to it. So with bridges : e. g. Pontifex ; Dervorguilla, 
our Balliol saint that built a bridge ; the devil that 
will hinder the building of bridges ; cf. the Porphyry 
Bridge in the Malay cosmogony ; Amershickel, 
Briickengebildung im kult-Historischer. Passen- 
mayer ; Durat, " Le pont antique, etude sur les 
origines Toscanes ; " Mr. Dacre's "The Com- 
mand of Bridges in Warfare ; " " Bridges and 
Empire," by Captain Hole, U.S.A. You may say 
all this; I shall not reply. If the heat has hindered 
me from saying a word of the fine open valley on 
the left, of the little railway and of the last of the 
hills, do you suppose it will permit me to discuss 
the sanctity of bridges? If it did, I think there is 



THE NEW GUIDE-BOOK 381 

a little question on " why should habit turn sacred ? " 
which would somewhat confound and pose you, and 
pose also, for that matter, every pedant that ever 
went blind and crook-backed over books, or took 
ivory for horn. And there is an end of it. Argue 
it with whom you will. It is evening, and I am at 
Borgo (for if many towns are called Castel-Nuovo 
so are many called Borgo in Italy), and I desire to 
be free of interruption while I eat and sleep and 
reflect upon the error of that march in that heat, 
spoiling nearly thirty miles of road, losing so many 
great and pleasurable emotions, all for haste and 
from a neglect of the Italian night. 

And as I sat, and before I slept, I thought of 
that annotated Guide Book which is cried out for by 
all Europe, and which shall tell blunt truths. Look 
you out " Garfagnana, district of Valley of Sercbio " 
in the index. You will be referred to p. 267. Turn 
to p. 267. You will find there the phrase — 

" One can walk from the pretty little village of Sil- 
lano, nestling in its chestnut groves, to the flourishing 
town of Borgo on the new Bagni railway in a day." 

You will find a mark * after that phrase. It 
refers to a footnote. Glance (or look) at the 
bottom of the page and you will find : — 

1 But if one does one is a fool. 



3 82 



DFXIMO 



So I slept late and uneasily the insufficient sleep 
of men who have suffered, and in that uneasy sleep 
I discovered this great truth : that if in a southern 
summer you do not rest in the day the night will 
seem intolerably warm, but that, if you rest in the 
day, you will find coolness and energy at evening. 

The next morning with daylight I continued 
the road to Lucca, and of that also I will say 
nothing. 

Lector. Why on earth did you write this book ? 

Auctor. For my amusement. 

Lector. And why do you suppose I got it ? 

Auctor. I cannot conceive 
. . . however, I will give up 
this much, to tell you that at 
~-Decimo the mystery of cypress 
trees first came into my adven- 
ture and pilgrimage : of cypress 
trees which henceforward were 
to mark my Tuscan road. 
And I will tell you that there 
also I came across a thing 
peculiar (I suppose) to the 
region of Lucca, for I saw it 
there as at Decimo, and also some miles beyond. I 
mean fine mournful towers built thus : In the first 



HSU 




WHY "DECIMO": 383 

storey one arch, in the second two, in the third 
three, and so on : a very noble way of building. 

And I will tell you something more. I will tell 
you something no one has yet heard. To wit, why 
this place is called Decimo, and why just below 
it is another little spot called Sexta. 

Lector . . . 

Auctor. I know what you are going to say ! 
Do not say it. You are going to say : " It is 
because they were at the sixth and tenth mile- 
stones from Lucca on the Roman road." Heaven 
help these scientists ! Did you suppose that I 
thought it was called Decimo because the people 
had ten toes ? Tell me, why is not every place 
ten miles out of a Roman town called by such 
a name ? Eh ? You are dumb. You cannot 
answer. Like most moderns you have entirely 
missed the point. We all know that there was 
a Roman town at Lucca, because it was called 
Luca, and if there had been no Roman town the 
modern town would not be spelt with two c's. 
All Roman towns had milestones beyond them. 
But why did this tenth milestone from this Roman 
town keep its name ? 

Lector. I am indifferent. 

Auctor. I will tell you. Up in the tangle of 



384 BECAUSE OF THIS 

the Carrara mountains, overhanging the Garfagnana, 
was a wild tribe, whose name I forget (unless it 
were the Bruttii), but which troubled the Romans 
not a little, defeating them horribly, and keeping 
the legionaries in some anxiety for years. So when 
the soldiers marched out north from Luca about 
six miles, they could halt and smile at each other, 
and say "At Sextam . . . that's all right. All safe 
so far ! " and therefore only a little village grew up 
at this little rest and emotion. But as they got 
nearer the gates of the hills they began to be visibly 
perturbed, and they would say : " The eighth mile! 
cheer up !" Then " The ninth mile ! Sanctissima 
Madonna ! Have you seen anything moving on 
the heights ? " But when they got to the tenth 
milestone, which stands before the very jaws of 
the defile, then indeed they said with terrible 
emphasis, " Ad Decimam ! " And there was no 
restraining them : they would camp and entrench, 
or die in the venture : for they were Romans and 
stern fellows, and loved a good square camp and 
a ditch, and sentries and a clear moon, and plenty 
of sharp stakes, and all the panoply of war. That 
is the origin of Decimo. 

For all my early start, the intolerable heat had 



LUCCA 385 

again taken the ascendant before I had fairly 
entered the plain. Then, it being yet but morn- 
ing, I entered from the north the town of Lucca, 
which is the neatest, the regularest, the exactest, 
the most fly-in-amber little town in the world, 
with its uncrowded streets, its absurd fortifications, 
and its contented silent houses — all like a family at 
ease and at rest under its high sun. It is as sharp 
and trim as its own map, and that map is as clear 
as a geometrical problem. Everything in Lucca is 
good. 

I went with a short shadow, creeping when I 
could on the eastern side of the street to save 
the sunlight ; then I came to the main square, and 
immediately on my left was the Albergo di Some- 
thing-or-other, a fine great hotel, but most un- 
fortunately right facing the blazing sky. I had 
to stop outside it to count my money. I counted 
it wrong and entered. There I saw the master, who 
talked French. 

" Can you in an hour," said I, " give me a meal 
to my order, then a bed, though it is early day ? " 
This absurd question I made less absurd by explain- 
ing to him my purpose. How I was walking to 
Rome, and how, being northern, I was unaccustomed 
to such heat ; how, therefore, I had missed sleep, 

25 



386 THE BANQUET 

and would find it necessary in future to walk mainly 
by night. For I had now determined to fill the last 
few marches up in darkness, and to sleep out the 
strong hours of the sun. 

All this he understood ; I ordered such a meal as 
men give to beloved friends returned from wars. 
I ordered a wine I had known long ago in the valley 
of the Saone in the old time of peace before ever the 
Greek came to the land. While they cooked it I went 
to their cool and splendid cathedral to follow a late 
Mass. Then I came home and ate their admirable 
food and drank the wine which the Burgun- 
dians had trodden upon the hills of gold so many 
years before. They showed me a regal kind of a 
room where a bed with great hangings invited 
repose. 

All my days of marching, the dirty inns, the 
forests, the nights abroad, the cold, the mists, the 
sleeplessness, the faintness, the dust, the dazzling 
sun, the Apennines — all my days came over me, and 
there fell on me a peaceful weight, as his two 
hundred years fell upon Charlemagne in the tower 
of Saragossa when the battle was done, after 
he had curbed the valley of Ebro and christened 
Bramimonde. 

So I slept deeply all day long ; and, outside, the 



THE HILL OF LUCCA 387 

glare made a silence upon the closed shutters, 
save that little insects darted in the outer air. 



When I woke it was evening. So well had they 
used me that I paid what they asked, and, not know- 
ing what money remained over, I left their town by 
the southern gate, crossed the railway and took the 
road. 

My way lay under the flank of that mountain 
whereby the Luccans cannot see Pisa, or the Pisans 
cannot see Lucca — it is all one to me, I shall not 
live in either town, God willing ; and if they are so 
eager to squint at one another, in Heaven's name, 
cannot they be at the pains to walk round the end 
of the hill ? It is this laziness which is the ruin of 
many ; but not of pilgrims, for here was I off to 
cross the plain of Arno in one night, and reach by 
morning the mouth and gate of that valley of the 
Elsa, which same is a very manifest proof of how 
Rome was intended to be the end and centre of all 
roads, the chief city of the world, and the Popes' 
residence — as, indeed, it plainly is to this day, for 
all the world to deny at their peril, spiritual, geo- 
graphical, historical, sociological, economic, and 
philosophical. 



388 NOTHING PARTICULAR 

For if some such primeval and predestinarian 
quality were not inherent in the City, how, think 
you, would the valley of the Serchio — the hot, 
droughty, and baking Garfagnana — lead down point- 
ing straight to Rome ; and how would that same 
line, prolonged across the plain, find fitting it 
exactly beyond that plain this vale of the Elsa, 
itself leading up directly towards Rome ? I say, 
nowhere in the world is such a coincidence observ- 
able, and they that will not take it for a portent 
may go back to their rationalism and consort with 
microbes and make their meals off logarithms, 
washed down with an exact distillation of the root 
of minus one ; and the peace of fools, that is the 
deepest and most balmy of all, be theirs for ever 
and ever. 

Here again you fall into errors as you read, ever 
expecting something new ; for of that night's march 
there is nothing to tell, save that it was cool, full of 
mist, and an easy matter after the royal entertain- 
ment and sleep of the princely Albergo that dignifies 
Lucca. The villages were silent, the moon soon left 
the sky, and the stars could not show through the 
fog, which deepened in the hours after midnight. 

A map I had bought in Lucca made the diffi- 
culties of the first part of the road (though there 



THE ELSA VALLEY 389 

were many cross-ways) easy enough ; and the second 
part, in midnight and the early hours, was very plain 
sailing, till — having crossed the main line and 
having, at last, very weary, come up to the 
branch railway at a slant from the west and 
north, I crossed that also under the full light — I 
stood fairly in the Elsa valley and on the highroad 
which follows the railway straight to Siena. That 
long march, I say, had been easy enough in the 
coolness and in the dark ; but I saw nothing ; 
my interior thoughts alone would have afforded 
matter for this part ; but of these if you have 
not had enough in near six hundred miles of travel, 
you are a stouter fellow than I took you for. 

Though it was midsummer, the light had come 
quickly. Long after sunrise the mist dispersed, 
and the nature of the valley appeared. 

It was in no way mountainous, but easy, plea- 
sant, and comfortable, bounded by low, rounded 
hills, having upon them here and there a row of 
cypresses against the sky; and it was populous 
with pleasant farms. Though the soil was baked 
and dry, as indeed it is everywhere in this souths 
yet little regular streams (or canals) irrigated it 
and nourished many trees — but the deep grass of 
the north was wanting. 



390 JAMES BAYLK, POET 

For an hour or more after sunrise I continued 
my way very briskly ; then what had been the warmth 
of the early sun turned into the violent heat of day, 
and remembering Merlin where he says that those 
who will walk by night must sleep by day, and hav- 
ing in my mind the severe verses of James Bayle, 
sometime Fellow of St. Anne's, that "in Tuscan 
summers as a general rule, the days are sultry but 
the nights are cool " (he was no flamboyant poet ; 
he loved the quiet diction of the right wing of 
English poetry), and imagining an owlish habit 
of sleeping by day could be acquired at once, I lay 
down under a tree of a kind I had never seen ; and 
lulled under the pleasant fancy that this was a pic- 
ture-tree drawn before the Renaissance, and that 
I was reclining in some background landscape of 
the fifteenth century (for the scene was of that 
kind), I fell asleep. 

When I woke it was as though I had slept long; 
but I doubted the feeling. The young sun still 
low in the sky, and the shadows not yet shortened, 
puzzled me. I looked at my watch, but the dis- 
location of habit which night marches produce had 
left it unwound. It marked a quarter to three, 
which was absurd. I took the road somewhat 
stiffly and wondering. I passed several small white 



THE TEMPTATION 391 

cottages ; there was no clock in them, and their 
people were away. At last in a Trattoria, as they 
served me with food, a woman told me it was just 
after seven ; I had slept but an hour. 

Outside, the day was intense ; already flies had 
begun to annoy the darkened room within. Through 
the half-curtained door the road was white in the 
sun, and the railway ran just beyond. 

I paid my reckoning, and then, partly for an 
amusement, I ranged my remaining pence upon 
the table, first in the shape of a Maltese cross, then 
in a circle (interesting details !). The road lay 
white in the sunlight outside, and the railway ran 
just beyond. 

I counted the pence and the silver — there was 
three francs and a little over ; I remembered the 
imperial largesse at Lucca, the lordly spending of 
great sums, where, now in the pocket of an obse- 
quious man, the pounds were taking care of them- 
selves. I remembered how at Como I had been 
compelled by poverty to enter the train for Milan. 
How little was three francs for the remaining 
twenty-five miles to Siena ! The road lay white in 
the sunlight, and the railway ran just beyond. 

I remembered the pleasing cheque in the post- 
office of Siena ; the banks of Siena, and the money- 



392 THE FALL 

changers at their counters changing monev at the 
rate of change. 

" If one man," thought I, " may take five per 
cent, discount on a sum of money in the exchange, 
may not another man take discount off a walk of over 
seven hundred miles? May he not cut off it, as his 
due, twenty-five miserable little miles in the train ? " 
Sleep coming over me after my meal increased the 
temptation. Alas ! how true is the great phrase of 
Averroes (or it may be Boa-ed-din : anyhow, the 
Arabic escapes me, but the meaning is plain enough), 
that when one has once fallen, it is easy to fall 
again (saving always heavy falls from cliffs and high 
towers, for after these there is no more falling). 
. . . Examine the horse's knees before you buy 
him ; take no ticket-of-leave man into your house 
for charity ; touch no prospectus that has founders' 
shares, and do not play with firearms or knives ; 
and never go near the water till you know how to 
swim. Oh ! blessed wisdom of the ages ! sole pat- 
rimony of the poor ! The road lay white in the 
sun, and the railway ran just beyond. 

If the people of Milo did well to put up a statue 
in gold to the man that invented wheels, so should 
we also put one up in Portland stone or plaster to 



SIENA 393 

the man that invented rails, whose property it is 
not only to increase the speed and ease of travel, but 
also to bring on slumber as can no drug : not even 
poppies gathered under a waning moon. The rails 
have a rhythm of slight falls and rises . . . they make 
a loud roar like a perpetual torrent ; they cover up 
the mind with a veil. 

Once only, when a number of men were shouting 
" Poggi-bon-si," like a war-cry to the clank of 
bronze, did I open my eyes sleepily to see a hill, 
a castle wall, many cypresses, and a strange tower 
bulging out at the top (such towers I learned were 
the feature of Tuscany). Then in a moment, as 
it seemed, I awoke in the station of Siena, where 
the railway ends and goes no farther. 

It was still only morning ; but the glare was beyond 
bearing as I passed through the enormous gate of 
the town, a gate pierced in high and stupendous 
walls that are here guarded by lions. In the narrow 
main street there was full shade, and it was made 
cooler by the contrast of the blaze on the higher 
storeys of the northern side. The wonders of Siena 
kept sleep a moment from my mind. I saw their 
great square where a tower of vast height marks 
the guildhall. I heard Mass in a chapel of their 
cathedral : a chapel all frescoed, and built, as it 



394 A REFERENCE 

were, out of doors, and right below the altar-end or 
choir. I noted how the city stood like a queen of 
hills dominating all Tuscany : above the Elsa north- 
ward, southward above the province round Mount 
Amiato. And this great mountain I saw also hazily 
far off on the horizon. I suffered the vulgarities of 
the main street all in English and American, like a 
show. I took my money and changed it ; then, 
having so passed not a full hour, and oppressed by 
weariness, I said to myself: 

" After all, my business is not with cities, and 
already I have seen far off the great hill whence 
one can see far off" the hills that overhang Rome." 

With this in my mind I wandered out for a 
quiet place, and found it in a desolate green to the 
north of the city near a huge, old red-brick church 
like a barn. A deep shadow beneath it invited 
me in spite of the scant and dusty grass, and in 
this country no one disturbs the wanderer. There, 
lying down, I slept without dreams till evening. 

Auctor. Turn to page 170. 

Lector. I have it. It is not easy to watch the 
book in two places at once ; but pray continue. 

Auctor. Note the words from the fifth to the 
ninth lines. 



ANOTHER STORY 395 

Lector. Why ? 

Auctor. They will make what follows seem less 
abrupt. 

Once there was a man dining by himself at the 
Cafe Anglais, in the days when people went there. 
It was a full night, and he sat alone at a small 
table, when there entered a very big man in a large 
fur coat. The big man looked round annoyed, 
because there was no room, and the first man very 
courteously offered him a seat at his little table. 
They sat down and ate and talked of several things ; 
among others, of Bureaucracy. The first maintained 
that Bureaucracy was the curse of France. 

" Men are governed by it like sheep. The ad- 
ministrator, however humble, is a despot ; most 
people will even run forward to meet him half- 
way, like the servile dogs they are," said he. 

" No," answered the big man in the fur coat, 
" I should say men were governed just by the 
ordinary human sense of authority. I have no 
theories. I say they recognise authority and obey 
it. Whether it is bureaucratic or not is merely 
a question of form." 

At this moment there came in a tall, rather stiff 
Englishman. He also was put out at finding no 



396 STORY OF THE 

room. The two men saw the manager approach 
him ; a few words passed, and a card ; then the 
manager suddenly smiled, bowed, smirked, and 
finally went up to the table and begged that the 
Duke of Sussex might be allowed to share it. The 
Duke hoped he did not incommode these gentle- 
men. They assured him that, on the contrary, 
they esteemed his presence a favour. 

" It is our prerogative," said the big man in the 
fur coat, " to be the host Paris entertaining her 
Guest." 

They would take no denial ; they insisted on the 
Duke's dining with them, and they told him what 
they had just been discussing. The Duke listened 
to their theories with some morgue, much spleen, and 
no little phlegm, but with perfect courtesy, and then, 
towards the coffee, told them in fluent French 
with a strong accent, his own opinion. (He had had 
eight excellent courses ; Yquem with his fish, the 
best Chambertin during the dinner, and a glass of 
wonderful champagne with his dessert.) He spoke 
as follows, with a slight and rather hard smile : — 

" My opinion may seem to you impertinent, but 
I believe nothing more subtly and powerfully 
affects men than the aristocratic feeling. Do not 
misunderstand me," he added, seeing that they 



DUKE OF SUSSEX 397 

would protest ; " it is not my own experience alone 
that guides me. All history bears witness to the 
same truth." 

The simple-minded Frenchmen put down this 
infatuation to the Duke's early training, little 
knowing that our English men of rank are the 
simplest fellows in the world, and are quite in- 
different to their titles save in business matters. 

The Frenchmen paid the bill, and they all three 
went out on to the Boulevard. 

" Now," said the first man to his two com- 
panions, " I will give you a practical example of 
what I meant when I said that Bureaucracy governed 
mankind." 

He went up to the wall of the Credit Lyonnais, 
put the forefinger of either hand against it, about 
twenty-five centimetres apart, and at a level of 
about a foot above his eyes. Holding his fingers 
thus he gazed at them, shifting them slightly from 
time to time and moving his glance from one to 
the other rapidly. A crowd gathered. In a few 
moments a pleasant elderly, short, and rather fat 
gentleman in the crowd came forward and, taking 
off his hat, asked if he could do anything for him. 

" Why," said our friend, " the fact is I am an 
engineer (section D of the Public Works Depart- 



398 STORY OF THE 

ment), and I have to make an important measure- 
ment in connection with the Apothegm of the 
Bilateral which runs to-night precisely through this 
spot. My ringers now mark exactly the concentric 
of the secondary focus whence the Radius Vector 
should be drawn, but I find that (like a fool) I 
have left my Double Refractor in the cafe hard 
by. I dare not go for fear of losing the place I 
have marked; yet I can get no further without my 
Double Refractor." 

" Do not let that trouble you," said the short, 
stout stranger ; " I will be delighted to keep the 
place exactly marked while you run for your in- 
strument." 

The crowd was now swelled to a considerable 
size ; it blocked up the pavement, and was swelled 
every moment by the arrival of the curious. The 
little fat elderly man put his fingers exactly where 
the other's had been, effecting the exchange with a 
sharp gesture; and each watched intently to see 
that it was right to within a millimetre. The 
attitude was constrained. The elderly man smiled, 
and begged the engineer not to be alarmed. So 
they left him with his two forefingers well above 
his head, precisely twenty-five centimetres apart, and 
pressing their tips against the wali of the Credit 



DUKE OF SUSSEX 399 

Lyonnais. Then the three friends slipped out of 
the crowd and pursued their way. 

" Let us go to the theatre," said the experi- 
menter, " and when we come back I warrant you 
will agree with my remarks on Bureaucracy." 

They went to hear the admirable marble lines of 
Corneille. For three hours they were absorbed by 
the classics, and, when they returned, a crowd, now 
enormous, was surging all over the Boulevard, 
stopping the traffic and filled with a noise like the 
sea. Policemen were attacking it with the utmost 
energy, but still it grew and eddied ; and in the 
centre — a little respectful space kept empty around 
him — still stretched the poor little fat elderly man, 
a pitiable sight. His knees were bent, his head 
wagged and drooped with extreme fatigue, he was 
the colour of old blotting-paper ; but still he kept 
the tips of his two forefingers exactly twenty-five 
centimetres apart, well above his head, and pressed 
against the wall of the Credit Lyonnais. 

" You will not match that with your aristocratic 
sentiment ! " said the author of the scene in pardon- 
able triumph. 

" I am not so sure," answered the Duke of Sussex. 
He pulled out his watch. " It is midnight," he 
said, " and I must be off; but let me tell you 



4 oo DESIRABLE OMISSIONS 

before we part that you have paid for a most 
expensive dinner, and have behaved all night with 
an extravagant deference under the impression that 
I was the Duke of Sussex. As a fact my name is 
Jerks, and I am a commercial traveller in the lin- 
seed oil line ; and I wish you the best of good 
evenings." 

"Wait a moment," said the Man in the Big 
Fur Coat; "my theory of the Simple Human Sense 
of Authority still holds. I am a detective officer, 
and you will both be good enough to follow me to 
the police station." 

And so they did, and the Engineer was fined fifty 
francs in correctional, and the Duke of Sussex 
was imprisoned for ten days, with interdiction of 
domicile for six months ; the first indeed under the 
Prefectorial Decree of the 1 8th of November 1843, 
but the second under the law of the 12th germinal 
of the year VIII. 

• ••••• 

In this way I have got over between twenty and 
thirty miles of road which were tramped in the 
dark, and the description of which would have 
plagued you worse than a swarm of hornets. 

Oh, blessed interlude ! no struggling moon, no 
mist, no long-winded passages upon the genial earth, 



ST. AUGUSTINE CENSURED 401 

no the sense of the night, no marvels of the dawn, no 
rhodomontade, no religion, no rhetoric, no sleeping 
villages, no silent towns (there was one), no rustle 
of trees — just a short story, and there you have a 
whole march covered as though a brigade had swung 
down it. A new day has come, and the sun has 
risen over the detestable parched hillocks of this 
downward way. 

No, no, Lector ! Do not blame me that Tus- 
cany should have passed beneath me unnoticed, as 
the monotonous sea passes beneath a boat in full 
sail. Blame all those days of marching ; hundreds 
upon hundreds of miles that exhausted the powers 
of the mind. Blame the fiery and angry sky of 
Etruria that compelled most of my way to be 
taken at night. Blame St. Augustine, who misled 
me in his confessions by talking like an African of 
"the icy shores of Italy;" or blame Rome, that 
now more and more drew me to Herself as She 
approached from six to five, from five to four, 
from four to three — now She was but three days 
off. The third sun after that I now saw rising 
would shine upon the City. 

I did indeed go forward a little in the heat, but 
it was useless. After an hour I abandoned it. It 
was not so much the sun, though that was intem- 

26 



+ o2 THE ITALIAN DESERT 

perate and deadly ; it was rather the inhuman aspect 
of the earth which made me despair. It was as 
though the soil had been left imperfect and rough 
after some cataclysm ; it reminded me of those bad 
lands in the west of America, where the desert has 
no form, and where the crumbling and ashy look of 
things is more abhorrent than their mere desolation. 
As soon march through evil dreams ! 

The north is the place for men. Eden was there; 
and the four rivers of Paradise are the Seine, the 
Oise, the Thames, and the Arun; there are grasses 
there, and the trees are generous, and the air is an 
unnoticed pleasure. The waters brim up to the 
edges of the fields. But for this bare Tuscany 
I was never made. 

How far I had gone I could not tell, nor precisely 
how much farther San Quirico, the neighbouring 
town, might be. The imperfect map 1 had bought 
at Siena was too minute to give me clear indications. 
I was content to wait for evening, and then to go on 
till I found it. An hour or so in the shade of a 
row of parched and dusty bushes I lay and ate and 
drank my wine, and smoked, and then all day I 
slept, and woke a while, and slept again more deeply. 
But how people sleep and wake, if you do not yet 
know it after so much of this book you never will. 



SAN QUIRICO 403 

It was perhaps five o'clock, or rather more, when 
I rose unhappily and took up the ceaseless road. 

Even the goodness of the Italian nature seemed 
parched up in those dry hollows. At an inn 
where I ate they shouted at me, thinking in that 
way to make me understand ; and their voices were 
as harsh as the grating of metal against stone. A 
mile farther I crossed a lonely line of railway; then 
my map told me where I was, and I went wearily 
up an indefinite slope under the declining sun, and 
thought it outrageous that only when the light had 
gone was there any tolerable air in this country. 

Soon the walls of San —^3.-— . 

Quirico, partly ruinous, m^ r ^% 

stood above the fields (for **»L&zzc£^g t § mffi^.M 
the smallest places here '^n^^^f^PfM^--' ' 
have wails) ; as I entered '^la « ^V^^K^?. 1 
its gate the sun set, and 
as though the cool, com- 
ing suddenly, had a magic ' 
in it, everything turned kinder. A church that 
could wake interest stood at the entry of the town; 
it had stone lions on its steps, and the pillars were 
so carved as to resemble knotted ropes. There for 
the first time I saw in procession one of those 




4 o 4 THE VALLEY 

confraternities which in Italy bury the dead; they 
had long and dreadful hoods over their heads, 
with slits for the eyes. I spoke to the people of 
San Quirico, and they to me. They were up- 
standing, and very fine and noble in the lines of 
the face. On their walls is set a marble tablet, on 
which it is registered that the people of Tuscany, 
being asked whether they would have their heredi- 
tary Duke or the House of Savoy, voted for the 
latter by such and such a great majority ; and this 
kind of tablet I afterwards found was common to 
all these small towns. Then passing down their 
long street I came, at the farther gate, to a great 
sight, which the twilight still permitted me to 
receive in its entirety. 

For San Quirico is built on the edge of a kind 
of swell in the land, and here where I stood one 
looked over the next great wave ; for the shape 
of the view was, on a vast scale, just what one sees 
from a lonely boat looking forward over a following 
sea. 

The trough of the wave was a shallow purple 
valley, its arid quality hidden by the kindly glimmer 
of evening; few trees stood in it to break its sweep, 
and its irregularities and mouldings were just those 
of a sweep of water after a gale. The crest of the 



LIKE A WAVE 



405 



wave beyond was seventeen miles away. It had, as 
have also such crests at sea, one highest, toppling 
peak in its long line, and this, against the clear sky, 




one could see to be marked by buildings. These 
buildings were the ruined castle and walls of Radi- 
cofani, and it lay straight on my way to Rome. 

It is a strange thing, arresting northern eyes, to 
see towns thus built on summits up into the sky, 
and this height seemed the more fantastic because 
it was framed. A row of cypress trees stood on 
either side of the road where it fell from San 



406 



THE SILHOUETTE 



Quirico, and, exactly between these, this high crest, 
a long way off, was set as though by design. 

With more heart in me, and tempted by such an 
outline as one might be by the prospect of ad- 
venture, I set out to cross the great bare run of the 
valley. As I went, the mountain of Amiato came 
more and more nearly abreast of me in the west; in 
its foothills near me were ravines and unexpected 

. , . rocks; upon one 

ot them hung a 
village. I watched 
its church and one 
tall cypress next 
it, as they stood 
black against the 
last of daylight. 
Then for miles I 
went on the dusty 
way, and crossed 
by old bridges 
watercourses in 
which stood noth- 
ing but green pools ; and the night deepened. 

It was when I had crossed the greater part of 
the obscure plain, at its lowest dip and not far 
from the climb up to Radicofani, that I saw lights 




THE GOOD FARMER 407 

shining in a large farmhouse, and though it was 
my business to walk by night, yet I needed com- 
panionship, so I went in. 

There in a very large room, floored with brick 
and lit by one candle, were two fine old peasants, 
with faces like apostles, playing a game of cards. 
There also was a woman playing with a strong boy 
child, that could not yet talk : and the child ran up 
to me. Nothing could persuade the master of the 
house but that I was a very poor man who needed 
sleep, and so good and generous was this old man 
that my protests seemed to him nothing but the 
excuses and shame of poverty. He asked me 
where I was going. I said, " To Rome." He 
came out with a lantern to the stable, and showed 
me there a manger full of hay, indicating that I 
might sleep in it . . . His candle flashed upon 
the great silent oxen standing in rows ; their enor- 
mous horns, three times the length of what we know 
in England, filled me with wonder . . . Well ! (may 
it count to me as gain !), rather than seem to 
offend him I lay down in that manger, though I 
had no more desire to sleep than has the flitter- 
mouse in our Sussex gloamings ; also I was careful 
to offer no money, for that is brutality. When he 
had left me I took the opportunity for a little rest. 



4 o8 POEM ON KING ALFRED 

and lay on my back in the hay wide-awake and 
staring at darkness. 

The great oxen champed and champed their 
food with a regular sound ; I remembered the 
steerage in a liner, the noise of the sea and the 
regular screw, for this it exactly resembled. I 
considered in the darkness the noble aspect of 
these beasts as I had seen them in the lantern 
light, and I determined when I got to Rome 
to buy two such horns, and to bring them to 
England and have them mounted for drinking 
horns — great drinking horns, a yard deep — and 
to get an engraver to engrave a motto for each. 
On the first I would have — 

" King Alfred was in Wantage born ; 
He drank out of a ram's born. 
Here is a better man than be, 
Who drinks deeper, as you see." 

Thus my friends drinking out of it should lift up 
their hearts and no longer be oppressed with 
humility. But on the second I determined for a 
rousing Latin thing, such as men shouted round 
camp fires in the year 888 or thereabouts ; 
so, the imagination fairly set going and taking 
wood-cock's flight, snipe-fashion, zigzag and 



THE HORN SONG 409 

devil-may-care-for-the-rules, this seemed to suit 



me 



" Salve, comu cortiuum ! 
Cornutorum vis Bourn. 
Mufius exce liens Deum ! 
Gregis o praesidium ! 
Sitis desiderium ! 
Digtium cornuum comu 
Romae memor salve tu ! 
Tibi cornuum cornuto — 



Lector. That means nothing. 
Auctor. Shut up ! 

" Tibi cornuum cornuto 
Tibi clamo, te saluto 
Salve comu cornuum ! 
Fortunatam da Domurn /" 

And after this cogitation and musing I got up 
quietly, so as not to offend the peasant; and I crept 
out, and so upwards on to the crest of the hill. 

But when, after several miles of climbing, I neared 
the summit, it was already beginning to be light. 
The bareness and desert grey of the distance I had 
crossed stood revealed in a colourless dawn, only 
the Mont' Amiata, now somewhat to the north- 
ward, was more gentle, and softened the scene with 
distant woods. Between it and this height ran a 



•f; 
-et 



410 RADICOFANI 

vague river-bed as dry as the stones of a salt 
beach. 

The sun rose as I passed under the ruined walls 

of the castle. In the 



J&^^r IffW _^^ ntt ' e town itself, early 
I^^C^ZZ^/^^^^^lL a s was the hour, many 
^ "*~~"* ^'' people were stirring. 

One gave me good-morning — a man of singular 
character, for here, in the very peep of day, he 
was sitting on a doorstep, idle, lazy and contented, 
as though it was full noon. Another was yoking 
oxen; a third going out singing to work in the 
fields. 

I did not linger in this crow's nest, but going out 
by the low and aged southern gate, another deeper 
valley, even drier and more dead than the last, 
appeared under the rising sun. It was enough to 
make one despair ! And when I thought of the 
day's sleep in that wilderness, of the next night's 
toil through it 

Lector. What about the Brigand of Radicofani 
of whom you spoke in Lorraine, and of whom I am 
waiting to hear ? 

Auctor. What about him ? Why, he was cap- 
tured long ago, and has since died of old age. I 
am surprised at your interrupting me with such 



SECOND FALL 411 

questions. Pray ask for no more tales till we get to 
the really absorbing story of the Hungry Student. 

Well, as I was saying, I was in some despair at 
the sight of that valley, which had to be crossed 
before I could reach the town of Acquapendente, or 
Hanging-water, which I knew to lie somewhere 
on the hills beyond. The sun was conquering me, 
and I was looking hopelessly for a place to sleep, 
when a cart drawn by two oxen at about one mile 
an hour came creaking by. The driver was asleep, 
his head on the shady side. The devil tempted me, 
and without one struggle against temptation, nay 
with cynical and congratulatory feelings, I jumped 
up behind, and putting my head also on the shady 
side (there were soft sacks for a bed) I very soon 
was pleasantly asleep. 

We lay side by side for hour after hour, and the 
day rose on to noon ; the sun beat upon our feet, 
but our heads were in the shade and we slept 
heavily a good and honest sleep : he thinking that 
he was alone, but I knowing that I was in company 
(a far preferable thing), and I was right and he was 
wrong. And the heat grew, and sleep came out 
of that hot sun more surely than it does out of 
the night air in the north. But no dreams wandei 
under the noon. 



4 i2 ACQUAPENDENTE 

From time to time one or the other of us would 
open our eyes drowsily and wonder, but sleep was 
heavy on us both, and our minds were sunk in calm 
like old hulls in the dark depths of the sea where 
there are no storms. 

We neither of us really woke until, at the bottom 
of the hill which rises into Acquapendente, the 
oxen stopped. This halt woke us up ; first me and 
then my companion. He looked at me a moment 
and laughed. He seemed to have thought all this 
while that I was some country friend of his who 
had taken a lift; and I, for my part, had made 
more or less certain that he was a good fellow 
who would do me no harm. I was right, and he 
was wrong. I knew not what offering to make 
him to compensate him for this trouble which his 
heavy oxen had taken. After some thought I 
brought a cigar out of my pocket, which he smoked 
with extreme pleasure. The oxen meanwhile had 
been urged up the slow hill, and it was in this 
way that we reached the famous town of Acqua- 
pendente. But why it should be called famous 
is more than I can understand. It may be that 
in one of those narrow streets there is a picture 
or a church, or one of those things which so attract 
unbelieving men. To the pilgrim it is simply a 



MORE SLEEP 413 

group of houses. Into one of these I went, and, 
upon my soul, I have nothing to say of it except 
that they furnished me with food. 

I do not pretend to have counted the flies, 
though they were numerous ; and, even had I done 
so, what interest would the number have, save to 
the statisticians ? Now, as these are patient men 
and foolish, I heartily recommend them to go and 
count the flies for themselves. 

Leaving this meal, then, this town and this 
people (which were all of a humdrum sort), and 
going out by the gate, the left side of which is made 
up of a church, I went a little way on the short 
road to San Lorenzo, but I had no intention of 
going far, for (as you know by this time) the night 
had become my day and the day my night. 

I found a stream running very sluggish between 
tall trees, and this sight sufficiently reminded me of 
my own country to permit repose. Lying down there 
I slept till the end of the day, or rather to that same 
time of evening which had now become my usual 
waking hour. . . . And now tell me, Lector, shall 
I leave out altogether, or shall I give you some de- 
scription of, the next few miles to San Lorenzo ? 

Lector. Why, if I were you I would put the 
matter shortly and simply, for it is the business 



4 i 4 HOW TO WRITE 

of one describing a pilgrimage or any other matter 
not to puff himself up with vain conceit, nor to be 
always picking about for picturesque situations, but 
to set down plainly and shortly what he has seen 
and heard, describing the whole matter. 

Auctor. But remember, Lector, that the artist 
is known not only by what he puts in but by what 
he leaves out. 

Lector. That is all very well for the artist, but 
you have no business to meddle with such people. 

Auctor. How then would you write such a 
book if you had the writing of it? 

Lector. I would not introduce myself at all ; I 
would not tell stories at random, nor go in for long 
descriptions of emotions, which I am sure other 
men have felt as well as I. I would be careful to 
visit those things my readers had already heard of 
(Auctor. The pictures ! the remarkable pictures ! 
All that is meant by culture ! The brown photo- 
graphs ! Oh ! Lector, indeed I have done you a 
wrong !), and I would certainly not have the bad 
taste to say anything upon religion. Above all, 
I would be terse. 

Auctor. I see. You would not pile words one 
on the other, qualifying, exaggerating, conditioning, 
superlativing, diminishing, connecting, amplifying, 



STORY OF MR. HARD 415 

condensing, mouthing, and glorifying the mere 
sound : you would be terse. You would be known 
for your self-restraint. There should be no ver- 
bosity in your style (God forbid!), still less pom- 
posity, animosity, curiosity, or ferocity ; you would 
have it neat, exact, and scholarly, and, above all, 
chiselled to the nail. A fig (say you), the pip 
of a fig, for the rambling style. You would be led 
into no hilarity, charity, vulgarity, or barbarity. 
Eh! my jolly Lector? You would simply say 
what you had to say ? 

Lector. Precisely ; I would say a plain thing in 
a plain way. 

Auctor. So you think one can say a plain thing 
in a plain way ? You think that words mean 
nothing more than themselves, and that you can 
talk without ellipsis, and that customary phrases 
have not their connotations ? You think that, 
do you ? Listen then to the tale of Mr. Benjamin 
Franklin Hard, a kindly merchant of Cincinnati, 
O., who had no particular religion, but who had ac- 
cumulated a fortune of six hundred thousand dollars, 
and who had a horror of breaking the Sabbath. He 
was not " a kind husband and a good father," for 
he was unmarried ; nor had he any children. But 
he was all that those words connote. 



4 i6 STORY OF MR. HARD 

This man Hard at the age of fittv-rour retired 
from business and determined to treat himself to a 
visit to Europe. He had not been in Europe five 
weeks before he ran . bang up against the Catholic 
Church. He was never more surprised in his lite. 
I do not mean that I have exactly weighed all his 
surprises all his life through. I mean that he was 
very much surprised indeed — and that is all that 
these words connote. 

He studied the Catholic Church with extreme 
interest. He watched High Mass at several places 
(hoping it might be different). He thought it was 
what it was not, and then, contrariwise, he thought 
it was not what it was. He talked to poor Catholics, 
rich Catholics, middle-class Catholics, and elusive, 
well-born, penniless, neatly-dressed, successful Catho- 
lics ; also to pompous, vain Catholics; humble, un- 
certain Catholics ; sneaking, pad-footed Catholics ; 
healthy, howling, combative Catholics ; doubtful, 
shoulder-shrugging, but devout Catholics; fixed, 
crabbed, and dangerous Catholics ; easy, jovial, and 
shone-upon-by-the-heavenly-light Catholics ; subtle 
Catholics ; strange Catholics, and [quod tibi mam 
feste absurdum videtur) intellectual, pince-nez^ jejune, 
twisted, analytical, yellow, cranky, and introspec- 
tive Catholics : in fine, he talked to all Catholics. 



STORY OF MR. HARD 417 

And when I say "all Catholics" I do not mean 
that he talked to every individual Catholic, but 
that he got a good, integrative grip of the Church 
militant, which is all that the words connote. 

Well, this man Hard got to know, among 
others, a certain good priest that loved a good 
bottle of wine, a fine deep dish of poulet a la 
casserole^ and a kind of egg done with cream in a 
little platter ; and eating such things, this priest said 
to him one day : " Mr. Hard, what you want is to 
read some books on Catholicism." And Hard, who 
was on the point of being received into the Church 
as the final solution of human difficulties, thought 
it would be a very good thing to instruct his mind 
before baptism. So he gave the priest a note to a 
bookseller whom an American friend had told him 
of; and this American friend had said: — 

" You will find Mr. Fingle " (for such was the 
bookseller's name) " a hard-headed, honest, business 
man. He can say a plain thing in a plain way." 

"Here," said Mr. Hard to the priest, "is ten 

pounds. Send it to this bookseller Fingle and he shall 

choose books on Catholicism to that amount, and 

you shall receive them, and I will come and read 

them here with you." 

So the priest sent the money, and in four days 

27 



4 i8 STORY OF MR. HARD 

the books came, and Mr. Hard and the priest 
opened the package, and these were the books 

inside : — 

Auricular Confession : a History. By a Brand 
Saved from the Burning. 

Isabella ; or, The Little Female Jesuit. By " Heph- 
zibah." 

Elisha MacNab : a Tale of the French Huguenots. 

England and Rome. By the Rev. Ebenezer Catch- 
pole of Emmanuel, Birmingham. 

Nuns and Nunneries. By " Ruth," with a Preface 
by Miss Carran, lately rescued from a Cana- 
dian Convent. 

History of the Inquisition. By Llorente. 

The Beast with Seven Heads ; or, The Apocalyptical 
Warning. 

No 'Truce with the Vatican. 

The True Cause of Irish Disaffection. 

Decline of the Latin Nations. 

Anglo-Saxons the Chosen Race, and their connection 
with the Ten Lost Tribes : with a map. 

Finally, a very large book at the bottom of the 
case called Giant Pope. 

And it was no use asking for the money back or 
protesting. Mr. Fingle was an honest, straight- 



STORY OF MR. HARD 4 i 9 

forward man who said a plain thing in a plain 
way. They had left him to choose a suitable 
collection of books on Catholicism, and he had 
chosen the best he knew. And thus did Mr. 
Hard (who has recently given a hideous font to 
the new Catholic church at Bismarckville) learn 
the importance of estimating what words connote. 

Lector. But all that does not excuse an in- 
tolerable prolixity ? 

Auctor. Neither did I say it did, dear Lector. 
My object was merely to get you to San Lorenzo 
where I bought that wine, and where, going out 
of the gate on the south, I saw suddenly the wide 
lake of Bolsena all below. 

It is a great sheet like a sea ; but as one knows 
one is on a high plateau, and as there is but a short 
dip down to it; as it is round and has all about 
it a rim of low even hills, therefore one knows it 
for an old and gigantic crater now full of pure 
water; and there are islands in it and palaces on 
the islands. Indeed it was an impression of silence 
and recollection, for the water lay all upturned to 
heaven, and, in the sky above me, the moon at her 
quarter hung still pale in the daylight, waiting 
for glory. 

I sat on the coping of a wall, drank a little 



4 2o THE MIGHTY DRIVE 

of my wine, ate a little bread and sausage; bul 
still song demanded some outlet in the cool evening, 
and companionship was more of an appetite in me 
than landscape. Please God, I had become southern 
and took beauty for granted. 

Anyhow, seeing a little two-wheeled cart come 
through the gate, harnessed to a ramshackle little 
pony, bony and hard, and driven by a little, brown, 
smiling, and contented old fellow with black hair, 
I made a sign to him and he stopped. 

This time there was no temptation of the 
devil; if anything the advance was from my 
side. I was determined to ride, and I sprang 
up beside the driver. We raced down the hill, 
clattering and banging and rattling like a piece 
of ordnance, and he, my brother, unasked began 
to sing. I sang in turn. He sang of Italy, I of 
four countries : America, France, England, and 
Ireland. I could not understand his songs nor he 
mine, but there was wine in common between us, 
and salami and a merry heart, bread which is the 
bond of all mankind, and that prime solution of 
ill-ease — I mean the forgetfulness of money. 

That was a good drive, an honest drive, a human 
aspiring drive, a drive of Christians, a glorifying 
and uplifted drive, a drive worthy of remembrance 



THE MIGHTY DRIVE 421 

for ever. The moon has shone on but few like 
it though she is old ; the lake of Bolsena has 
glittered beneath none like it since the Etruscans 
here unbended after the solemnities of a triumph. 
It broke my vow to pieces ; there was not a 
shadow of excuse for this use of wheels : it was 
done openly and wantonly in the face of the 
wide sky for pleasure. And what is there else but 
pleasure, and to what else does beauty move on ? 
Not I hope to contemplation ! A hideous oriental 
trick ! No, but to loud notes and comradeship and 
the riot of galloping, and laughter ringing through 
old trees. Who would change ( says Aristippus of 
Pslinthon ) the moon and all the stars for so much 
wine as can be held in the cup of a bottle upturned ? 
The honest man ! And in his time (note you) they 
did not make the devilish deep and fraudulent 
bottoms they do now that cheat you of half your 
liquor. 

Moreover, if I broke my vows (which is a serious 
matter), and if I neglected to contemplate the 
heavens (for which neglect I will confess to no 
one, not even to a postulate sub-deacon ; it is no 
sin ; it is a healthy omission), if (I say) I did this, I 
did what peasants do. And what is more, by 
drinking wine and eating pig we proved ourselves 



422 BOLSENA 

no Mohammedans; and on such as he is sure of, 
St. Peter looks with a kindlv eye. 

Now, just at the very entry to Bolsena, when we 
had followed the lovely lake some time, my driver 
halted and began to turn up a lane to a t;irm or 
villa; so I, bidding him good-night, crossed 
a field and stood silent by the lake and watched 
for a long time the water breaking on a tiny 
shore, and the pretty miniatures of waves. I 
stood there till the stars came out and the moon 
shone fully; then I went towards Bolsena under its 
high gate which showed in the darkness, and under 
its castle on the rock. There, in a large room 
which was not quite an inn, a woman of great age 
and dignity served me with fried fish from the lake, 
and the men gathered round me and attempted to 
tell me of the road to Rome, while I in exchange 
made out to them as much by gestures as by broken 
words the crossing of the Alps and the Apennines. 

Then, after my meal, one of the men told me I 
needed sleep ; that there were no rooms in that 
house ( as I said, it was not an inn ), but that across 
the way he would show me one he had for hire. I 
tried to say that my plan was to walk by night. 
They all assured me he would charge me a reason- 
able sum. I insisted that the day was too hot for 



BOLSENA 423 

walking. They told me, did these Etruscans, that 
I need fear no extortion from so honest a man. 

Certainly it is not easy to make everybody under- 
stand everything, and I had had experience already 
up in the mountains, days before, of how important 
it is not to be misunderstood when one is wander- 
ing in a foreign country, poor and ill-clad. I there- 
fore accepted the offer, and, what was really very 
much to my regret, I paid the money he demanded. 
I even so far fell in with the spirit of the thing as 
to sleep a certain number of hours (for, after all, my 
sleep that day in the cart had been very broken, 
and instead of resting throughout the whole of the 
heat I had taken a meal at Acquapendente). But 
I woke up not long after midnight — perhaps 
between one and two o'clock — and went out along 
the borders of the lake. 

The moon had set ; I wish I could have seen her 
hanging at the quarter in the clear sky of that 
high crater, dipping into the rim of its inland sea. 
It was perceptibly cold. I went on the road quite 
slowly, till it began to climb, and when the day 
broke I found myself in a sunken lane leading up 
to the town of Montefiascone. 

The town lay on its hill in the pale but growing 
light. A great dome gave it dignity, and a castle 



4 2 4 MONTEFIASCONE 

overlooked the lake. It was built upon the very 
edge and lip of the volcano-cup commanding either 
side. 

I climbed up this sunken lane towards it, not 
knowing what might be beyond, when, at the crest, 
there shone before me in the sunrise one of those 
unexpected and united landscapes which are among 
the glories of Italy. They have changed the very 
mind in a hundred northern painters, when men 
travelled hither to Rome to learn their art, and 
coming in by her mountain roads saw, time and 
again, the set views of plains like gardens, sur- 
rounded by sharp mountain-land and framed. 

The road did not pass through the town ; the 
grand though crumbling gate of entry lay up a 
short straight way to the right, and below, where 
the road continued down the slope, was a level of 
some eight miles full of trees diminishing in dis- 
tance. At its further side an ample mountain, 
wooded, of gentle flattened outline, but high and 
majestic, barred the way to Rome. It was yet 
another of those volcanoes, fruitful after death, 
which are the mark of Latium ; and it held hidden, 
as did that larger and more confused one on the rim 
of which I stood, a lake in its silent crater. But 
that lake, as I was to find, was far smaller than the 



VITERBO 425 

glittering sea of Bolsena, whose shores now lay 
behind me. 

The distance and the hill that bounded it should 
in that climate have stood clear in the pure 
air, but it was yet so early that a thin haze hung 
over the earth, and the sun had not yet controlled 
it : it was even chilly. I could not catch the 
towers of Viterbo, though I knew them to stand 
at the foot of the far mountain. I went down the 
road, and in half-an-hour or so was engaged upon 
the straight line crossing the plain. 

I wondered a little how the road would lie with 
regard to the. town, and looked at my map for 
guidance, but it told me little. It was too general, 
taking in all central Italy, and even large places 
were marked only by small circles. 

When I approached Viterbo I first saw an 
astonishing wall, perpendicular to my road, un- 
touched, the bones of the Middle Ages. It stood 
up straight before one like a range of cliffs, seeming 
much higher than it should ; its hundred feet or 
so were exaggerated by the severity of its stones 
and by their sheer fall. For they had no ornament 
whatever, and few marks of decay, though many 
of age. Tall towers, exactly square and equally 
bare of carving or machicolation, stood at intervals 



426 



THE GREAT WALLS 



along this forbidding defence and flanked its cur- 
tain. Then nearer by, one saw that it was not a 
huge castle, but the wall of a city, for at a corner 
it went sharp round to contain the town, and through 
one uneven place I saw houses. 
Many men were walking in the 
roads alongside these walls, 
and there were gates 
pierced in them * 

rc-JBBIH 



whereby the citi 




zens went in and out of the city as bees go in and 
out of the little opening in a hive. 

But my main road to Rome did not go through 



I ENTER VITERBO 427 

Viterbo, it ran alongside of the eastern wall, and 
I debated a little with myself whether I would go 
in or no. It was out of my way, and I had not 
entered Montefiascone for that reason. On the 
other hand, Viterbo was a famous place. It is all 
very well to neglect Florence and Pisa because they 
are some miles off the straight way, but Viterbo 
right under one's hand it is a pity to miss. Then 
I needed wine and food for the later day in the 
mountain. Yet, again, it was getting hot. It was 
past eight, the mist had long ago receded, and I 
feared delay. So I mused on the white road under 
the tall towers and dead walls of Viterbo, and ru- 
minated on an unimportant thing. Then curiosity 
did what reason could not do, and I entered by a 
gate. 

The streets were narrow, tortuous, and alive, all 
shaded by the great houses, and still full of the cold 
of the night. The noise of fountains echoed in 
them, and the high voices of women and the cries 
of sellers. Every house had in it something fan- 
tastic and peculiar ; humanity had twined into this 
place like a natural growth, and the separate 
thoughts of men, both those that were alive there 
and those dead before them, had decorated it all. 
There were courtyards with blinding whites of 



428 OUR FATHERS 

sunlit walls above, themselves in shadow ; and 
there were many carvings and paintings over doors. 
I had come into a great living place after the loneli- 
ness of the road. 

There, in the first wide street I could find, 
I bought sausage and bread and a great bottle of 
wine, and then quitting Viterbo, I left it by the 
same gate and took the road. 

For a long while yet I continued under the walls, 
noting in one place a thing peculiar to the Middle 
Ages, I mean the apse of a church built right into 
the wall as the old Cathedral of St. Stephen's was 
in Paris. These, I suppose, enemies respected if 
they could ; for I have noticed also that in castles 
the chapel is not hidden, but stands out from the 
wall. So be it. Your fathers and mine were 
there in the fighting, but we do not know their 
names, and I trust and hope yours spared the altars 
as carefully as mine did. 

The road began to climb the hill, and though 
the heat increased — for in Italy long before nine 
it is glaring noon to us northerners (and that 
reminds me : your fathers and mine, to whom 
allusion has been made above {as they say in the 
dull history books — [Lector. How many more 
interior brackets are we to have ? Is this algebra ? 



HOW THEY FOUGHT 429 

Auctor. You yourself, Lector, are responsible for 
the worst]} your fathers and mine coming down 
into this country to fight, as was their annual 
custom, must have had a plaguy time of it, when 
you think that they could not get across the Alps 
till summer-time, and then had to hack and hew, 
and thrust and dig, and slash and climb, and charge 
and puff, and blow and swear, and parry and 
receive, and aim and dodge, and butt and run 
for their lives at the end, under an unaccustomed 
sun. No wonder they saw visions, the dear people ! 
They are dead now, and we do not even know their 
names). — Where was I ? 

Lector. You were at the uninteresting remark 
that the heat was increasing. 

Auctor. Precisely. I remember. Well, the heat 
was increasing, but it seemed far more bearable than 
it had been in the earlier places ; in the oven of the 
Garfagnana or in the deserts of Siena. For with 
the first slopes of the mountain a forest of great 
chestnut trees appeared, and it was so cool under 
these that there was even moss, as though I were 
back again in my own country where there are full 
rivers in summer-time, deep meadows, and all the 
completion of home. 

Also the height may have begun to tell on the 



430 THE SILENT OLD MAN 

air, but not much, for when the forest was behind 
me, and when I had come to a bare heath sloping 
more gently upwards — a glacis in front ot the 
topmost bulwark of the round mountain — I was 
oppressed with thirst, and though it was not too 
hot to sing (for I sang, and two lonely carabinicri 
passed me singing, and we recognised as we saluted 
each other that the mountain was full of songs), 
yet I longed for a bench, a flagon, and shade. 

And as I longed, a little house appeared, and a 
woman in the shade sewing, and an old man. Also 
a bench and a table, and a tree over it. There I 
sat down and drank white wine and water many 
times. The woman charged me a halfpenny, and 
the old man would not talk. He did not take his 
old age garrulously. It was his business, not mine ; 
but I should dearly have liked to have talked to him 
in Lingua Franca, and to have heard him on the 
story of his mountain : where it was haunted, by 
what, and on which nights it was dangerous to be 
abroad. Such as it was, there it was. I left them, 
and shall perhaps never see them again. 

The road was interminable, and the crest, from 
which I promised myself the view of the crater-lake, 
was always just before me, and was never reached. 
A little spring, caught in a hollow log, refreshed 



THE POND OF VENUS 431 

a meadow on the right. Drinking there again, I 
wondered if I should go on or rest ; but I was full 
of antiquity, and a memory in the blood, or what 
not, impelled me to see the lake in the crater 
before I went to sleep : after a few hundred yards 
this obsession was satisfied. 

I passed between two banks, where the road had 
been worn down at the crest of the volcano's rim ; 
then at once, far below, in a circle of silent trees 
with here and there a vague shore of marshy land, 
I saw the Pond of Venus : some miles of brooding 
water, darkened by the dark slopes around it. Its 
darkness recalled the dark time before the dawn of 
our saved and happy world. 

At its hither end a hill, that had once been a 
cone in the crater, stood out all covered with a 
dense wood. It was the Hill of Venus. 

There was no temple, nor no sacrifice, nor no 
ritual for the Divinity, save this solemn attitude of 
perennial silence ; but under the influence which 
still remained and gave the place its savour, it 
was impossible to believe that the gods were dead. 
There were no men in that hollow ; nor was there 
any memory of men, save of men dead these 
thousands of years. There was no life of visible 
things. The mind released itself and was in touch 



432 THE FINAL VIEW 

with whatever survives of conquered but immortal 
Spirits. 

Thus ready for worship, and in a mood of 
adoration; filled also with the genius which in- 
habits its native place and is too subtle or too 
pure to suffer the effect of time, I passed down the 
ridge-way of the mountain rim, and came to the 
edge overlooking that arena whereon was first fought 
out and decided the chief destiny of the world. 

For all below was the Campagna. Names that are 
at the origin of things attached to every cleft and 
distant rock beyond the spreading level, or sanctified 
the gleams of rivers. There below me was Veii ; 
beyond, in the Wall of the Apennines, only just 
escaped from clouds, was Tibur that dignified the 
ravine at the edge of their rising ; that crest to 
the right was Tusculum, and far to the south, 
but clear, on a mountain answering my own, was 
the mother of the City, Alba Longa. The Tiber, 
a dense, brown fog rolling over and concealing it, 
was the god of the wide plain. 

Ther.e and at that moment I should have seen 
the City. I stood up on the bank and shaded my 
eyes, straining to catch the dome at least in the 
sunlight; but I could not, for Rome was hidden by 
the low Sabinian hills. 



SORACTE 433 

Soracte I saw there — Soracte, of which I had read 
as a boy. It stood up like an acropolis, but it 
was a citadel for no city. It stood alone, like that 



-■ — — --jrC" '' v - -^ =-■- - 




soul which once haunted its recesses and prophesied 
the conquering advent of the northern kings. I saw 
the fields where the tribes had lived that were the 
first enemies of the imperfect state, before it gave 
its name to the fortunes of the Latin race. 

Dark Etruria lay behind me, forgotten in the 
backward of my march : a furnace and a riddle out 
of which religion came to the Romans — a place that 
has left no language. But below me, sunlit and 
easy (as it seemed in the cooler air of that summit), 
was the arena upon which were first fought out 
the chief destinies of the world. 

And I still looked down upon it, wondering. 

Was it in so small a space that all the legends 
of one's childhood were acted ? Was the defence 
of the bridge against so neighbouring and petty an 

28 



434 THE ARENA 

alliance? Were they peasants of a group of huts 
that handed down the great inheritance of discipline, 
and made an iron channel whereby, even to us, the 
antique virtues could descend as a living memory ? 
It must be so; for the villages and ruins in one 
landscape comprised all the first generations of the 
history of Rome. The stones we admire, the large 
spirit of the last expression came from that rough 
village and sprang from the broils of that one 
plain ; Rome was most vigorous before it could 
speak. So a man's verse, and all he has, are but 
the last outward appearance, late and already rigid, 
of an earlier, more plastic, and diviner fire. 

<c Upon this arena," I still said to myself, "were 
first fought out the chief destinies of the world"; 
and so, played upon by an unending theme, I ate 
and drank in a reverie, still wondering, and then 
lay down beneath the shade of a little tree that 
stood alone upon that edge of a new world. And 
wondering, I fell asleep under the morning sun. 

But this sleep was not like the earlier oblivions 
that had refreshed my ceaseless journey, for I still 
dreamt as I slept of what I was to see, and visions of 
action without thought — pageants and mysteries — 
surrounded my spirit; and across the darkness of a 
mind remote from the senses there passed whatever 
is wrapped up in the great name of Rome. 



RONCIGLIONE 435 

When I woke the evening had come. A haze 
had gathered upon the plain. The road fell into 
Ronciglione, and dreams surrounded it upon every 
side. For the energy of the body those hours of 
rest had made a fresh and enduring vigour; for the 
soul no rest was needed. It had attained, at least 
for the next hour, a vigour that demanded only the 
physical capacity of endurance ; an eagerness worthy 
of such great occasions found a marching vigour 
for its servant. 

In Ronciglione I saw the things that Turner 
drew ; I mean the rocks from which a river springs, 
and houses all massed together, giving the steep a 
kind of crown. This also accompanied that picture, 
the soft light which mourns the sun and lends half- 
colours to the world. It was cool, and the oppor- 
tunity beckoned. I ate and drank, asking every one 
questions of Rome, and I passed under their great 
gate and pursued the road to the plain. In the mist, 
as it rose, there rose also a passion to achieve. 

All the night long, mile after mile, I hurried 
along the Cassian Way. For five days I had slept 
through the heat, and the southern night had 
become my daytime ; and though the mist was 
dense, and though the moon, now past her quarter, 
only made a vague place in heaven, yet expecta- 



436 THE MANY PEASANTS 

tion and fancy took more than the place of sight. 
In this fog I felt with every step of the night 
march the approach to the goal. 

Long past the place I had marked as a halt, long 
past Sette Vene, a light blurred upon the white 
wreaths of vapour ; distant songs and the noise of 
men feasting ended what had been for many, many 
hours — for more than twenty miles of pressing for- 
ward — an exaltation worthy of the influence that bred 
it. Then came on me again, after the full march, 
a necessity for food and for repose. But these 
things, which have been the matter of so much in 
this book, now seemed subservient only to the reach- 
ing of an end; they were left aside in the mind. 

It was an inn with trellis outside making an 
arbour. In the yard before it many peasants sat 
at table ; their beasts and waggons stood in the 
roadway, though, at this late hour, men were 
feeding some and housing others. Within, fifty 
men or more were making a meal or a carousal. 

What feast or what necessity of travel made 
them keep the night alive I neither knew nor 
asked ; but passing almost unobserved amongst 
them between the long tables, I took my place at the 
end, and the master served me with good food and 
wine. As I ate the clamour of the peasants sounded 
about me, and I mixed with the energy of numbers. 



ROME CALLS ME 437 

With a little difficulty I made the master under- 
stand that I wished to sleep till the dawn. He led 
me out to a small granary (for the house was full), 
and showed me where I should sleep in the scented 
hay. He would take no money for such a lodging, 
and left me after showing me how the door 
latched and unfastened ; and out of so many men, 
he was the last man whom I thanked for a service 
until I passed the gates of Rome. 

Above the soft bed which the hay made, a square 
window, unglazed, gave upon the southern night ; 
the mist hardly drifted in or past it, so still was the 
air. I watched it for a while drowsily ; then sleep 
again fell upon me. 

But as I slept, Rome, Rome still beckoned me, 
and I woke in a struggling light as though at 
a voice calling, and slipping out I could not but go 
on to the end. 

The small square paving of the Via Cassia, all 
even like a palace floor, rang under my steps. The 
parched banks and strips of dry fields showed 
through the fog (for its dampness did not cure 
the arid soil of the Campagna). The sun rose and 
the vapour lifted. Then, indeed, I peered through the 
thick air — but still I could see nothing of my goal, 
only confused folds of brown earth and burnt-up 



438 



ROME 



grasses, and farther off rare and un- northern 
trees. 

I passed an old tower of the Middle Ages that 
was eaten away at its base by time or the quarrying 
of men ; I passed a divergent way on the right 
where a wooden sign said " The Triumphal Way," 
and I wondered whether it could be the road where 
ritual had once ordained that triumphs should go. 
It seemed lonely and lost, and divorced from any 
approach to sacred hills. 

The road fell into a hollow where soldiers were 
manoeuvring. Even these could not arrest an 
attention that was fixed upon the approach- ; fb 
ing revelation. The road climbed a little slope jy||) 
where a branch went off A to the left, and 
where there was a house 
and an arbour under vines. ijjP' 
It was now warm day ; trees •# 
of great height stood shad- Wi\ 
ing the sun; the place hadn 
taken on an appearance 9s 
of wealth and care. The 

mist had gone before I reached the summit of the 
rise. 

There, from the summit, between the high villa 
walls on either side — at my very feet I saw the City. 








FAREWELL TO ALL MEN 439 

And now all you people whatsoever that are pre- 
sently reading, may have read, or shall in the future 
read, this my many-sided but now-ending book ; 
all you also that in the mysterious designs of 
Providence may not be fated to read it for some 
very long time to come ; you then I say, entire, 
englobed, and universal race of men both in 
gross and regardant, not only living and seeing the 
sunlight, but dead also under the earth ; shades, 
or to come in procession afterwards out of the dark 
places into the day for a little, swarms of you, an 
army without end ; all you black and white, red, 
yellow and brown, men, women, children and poets 
— all of you, wherever you are now, or have been, 
or shall be in your myriads and deka myriads and 
hendeka myriads, the time has come when I must 
bid you farewell — 

Ludisti satis , edisti satis , atque bibisti ; 
Tempus abire tibi est. . . . 

Only Lector I keep by me for a very little while 
longer with a special purpose, but even he must 
soon leave me ; for all good things come to an end, 
and this book is coming to an end — has come to 
an end. The leaves fall, and they are renewed ; 
the sun sets on the Vexin hills, but he rises again 
over the woods of Marly. Human companionship 



44Q 



THE SAD SONG 



once broken can never be restored, and you and I 
shall not meet or understand each other again. It 
is so of all the poor links whereby we try to bridge 
the impassable gulf between soul and soul. Oh! we 
spin something, I know, but it is very gossamer, thin 
and strained, and even if it does not snap time will 
at last dissolve it. 

Indeed, there is a song on it which you should 
know, and which runs 



t r u- 



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ffi^3 



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L'a - more e una ca - te - na ; l'a - more e 



f=g=g=E 



s 



una ca - te - na ; l'a more e una ca - te - na, Che 



^ # 



*=F=F=t 



£ 



BE? 



non si spez - za ! 



Se si spezz' oi - li oi - la ! 



rfW^ 



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y 



Se si spez-za, buona sera ! Non si pu6 rac-com modar. 

-M * . \- ^-* « — 



3^ 



JJI 



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( This last, o?ie whistles.) 



So, my little human race, both you that have read 
this book and you that have not, good-bye in 



STORY OF MANKIND 441 

charity. I loved you all as I wrote. Did you all 
love me as much as I have loved you, by the black 
stone of Rennes I should be rich by now. Indeed, 
indeed, I have loved you all ! You, the workers, all 
puffed up and dyspeptic and ready for the asylums; 
and you, the good-for-nothing lazy drones ; you, the 
strong silent men, who have heads quite empty, 
like gourds ; and you also, the frivolous, useless 
men that chatter and gabble to no purpose all day 
long. Even you, that, having begun to read this 
book, could get no further than page 47, and espe- 
cially you who have read it manfully in spite of 
the flesh, I love you all, and give you here and now 
my final, complete, full, absolving, and comfortable 
benediction. 

To tell the truth, I have noticed one little fault 
about you. I will not call it fatuous, inane, and 
exasperating vanity or self-absorption ; I will put 
it in the form of a parable. Sit you round atten- 
tively and listen, dispersing yourselves all in order, 
and do not crowd or jostle. 

Once, before we humans became the good and 
self-respecting people we are, the Padre Eterno was 
sitting in heaven with St. Michael beside him, and 
He watched the abyss from His great throne, and 
saw shining in the void one far point of light amid 
some seventeen million others, and He said: 



442 OF ST. MICHAEL AND 

"What is that?" 

And St. Michael answered : 

"That is the Earth," for he felt some pride in it. 

"The Earth?" said the Padre Eterno, a little 
puzzled ..." The Earth ?...?... I do not 
remember very exactly . . ." 

"Why," answered St. Michael, with as much 
reverence as his annoyance could command, "surely 
you must recollect the Earth and all the pother there 
was in heaven when it was first suggested to create 
it, and all about Lucifer " 

" Ah ! " said the Padre Eterno, thinking twice, 
" yes. It is attached to Sirius, and " 

" No, no," said St. Michael, quite visibly put out. 
" It is the Earth. The Earth which has that chang- 
ing moon and the thing called the sea." 

" Of course, of course," answered the Padre 
Eterno quickly, " I said Sirius by a slip of the 
tongue. Dear me ! So that is the Earth ! Well, 
well ! It is years ago now . . . Michael, what 
are those little things swarming up and down all 
over it r 

"Those," said St. Michael, "are Men." 

" Men ? " said the Padre Eterno, " Men ... I 
know the word as well as any one, but somehow 
the connection escapes me. Men . . ." and He 
mused. 



OF THE PADRE ETERNO 443 

St. Michael, with perfect self-restraint, said a few 
things a trifle staccato, defining Man, his dual 
destiny, his hope of heaven, and all the great busi- 
ness in which he himself had fought hard. But 
from a fine military tradition, he said nothing of 
his actions, nor even of his shrine in Normandy, of 
which he is naturally extremely proud : and well he 
may be. What a hill! 

" I really beg your pardon," said the Padre 
Eterno, when he saw the importance attached to 
these little creatures. " I am sure they are worthy 
of the very fullest attention, and " (he added, for he 
was sorry to have offended) " how sensible they seem, 
Michael ! There they go, buying and selling, and 
sailing, driving, and wiving, and riding, and dancing 
and singing, and the rest of it ; indeed, they are 
most practical, business-like, and satisfactory little 
beings. But I notice one odd thing. Here and 
there are some not doing as the rest, or attending 
to their business, but throwing themselves into all 
manner of attitudes, making the most extraordinary 
sounds, and clothing themselves in the quaintest of 
garments. What is the meaning of that ? " 

" Sire ! " cried St. Michael, in a voice that shook the 
architraves of heaven, " they are worshipping You ! " 

" Oh ! they are worshipping me! Well, that is 
the most sensible thing I have heard of them yet, 



444 CONTINUEZ 

and I altogether commend them. Continuez" said 
the Padre Eterno, " continuez! " 

And since then all has been well with the world ; 
at least where Us continuent. 

And so, carissimi, multitudes, all of you, good- 
bye ; the day has long dawned on the Via Cassia, 
this dense mist has risen, the city is before me, and 
I am on the threshold of a great experience ; I would 
rather be alone. Good-bye, my readers ; good-bye, 
the world. 

At the foot of the hill I prepared to enter the 
City, and I lifted up my heart. 

There was an open space ; a tramway : a tram 
upon it about to be drawn by two lean and tired 
horses whom in the heat many flies disturbed. 
There was dust on everything around. 

A bridge was immediately in front. It was 
adorned with statues in soft stone, half-eaten away, 
but still gesticulating in corruption, after the manner 
of the seventeenth century. Beneath the bridge there 
tumbled and swelled and ran fast a great confusion 
of yellow water : it was the Tiber. Far on the 
right were white barracks of huge and of hideous ap- 
pearance ; over these the Dome of St. Peter's rose and 
looked like something newly built. It was of a deli- 
cate blue, but made a metallic contrast against the sky. 



THE END 445 

Then (along a road perfectly straight and bounded 
by factories, mean houses, and distempered walls : 
a road littered with many scraps of paper, bones, 
dirt, and refuse) I went on for several hundred 
yards, having the old wall of Rome before me all 
the time, till I came right under it at last ; and 
with the hesitation that befits all great actions I 
entered, putting the right foot first lest I should 
bring further misfortune upon that capital of all 
our fortunes. 

And so the journey ended. 

It was the Gate of the Poplar — not of the People. 
(Ho, Pedant! Did you think J missed you, hiding 
and lurking there?) Many churches were to hand; 
I took the most immediate, which stood just within 
the wall and was called Our Lady of the People 
— (not " of the Poplar." Another fall for the 
learned ! Professor, things go ill with you to-day !). 
Inside were many fine pictures, not in the niminy- 
piminy manner, but strong, full-coloured, and just. 

To my chagrin, Mass was ending. I approached 
a priest and said to him : — 

" Pater , quando vel a quella hora e la prossimma 
Missa ? " 

" Ad nonas" said he. 

" Pol! Hercle ! " (thought I), " I have yet twenty 



446 LOUD AND 

minutes to wait ! Well, as a pilgrimage cannot be 
said to be over till the first Mass is heard in 
Rome, I have twenty minutes to add to my book." 

So, passing an Egyptian obelisk which the great 
Augustus had nobly dedicated to the Sun, I en- 
tered. . . . 

Lector. But do you intend to tell us nothing 
of Rome ? 

Auctor. Nothing, dear Lector. 

Lector. Tell me at least one thing ; did you 
see the Coliseum ? 

Auctor. ... I entered a cafe at the right hand 
of a very long, straight street, called for bread, 
coffee, and brandy, and contemplating my boots 
and worshipping my staff that had been friends of 
mine so long, and friends like all true friends 
inanimate, I spent the few minutes remaining to 
my happy, common, unshriven, exterior, and natural 
life in writing down this 

DITHYRAMBIC 
EPITHALAMIUM or THRENODY 

In these boots, and with this staff 
Two hundred leaguers and a half — 

(That means, two and a half hundred leagues. You 
follow ? Not two hundred and one half leagues. . . . Well — ) 



' 






FINAL SONG 447 

Two hundred leaguers and a half 

Walked I, went I, paced I, tripped I, 

Marched 1, held I, skelped I, slipped I, 

Pushed 1, panted, swung and dashed I ,• 

Picked I, forded, swam and splashed I, 

Strolled I, climbed I, crawled and scrambled, 

Dropped and dipped 1, ranged and rambled ; 

Plodded I, hobbled I, trudged and tramped I, 

And in lonely spinnies camped I, 

And in haunted pinewoods slept I, 

Lingered, loitered, limped and crept I, 

Clambered, halted, stepped and leapt I ; 

Slowly sauntered, roundly strode I, 

And . . . (Oh ! Patron saints and Angels 

That protect the four evangels ! 
And you Prophets vel majores 
Vel incerti, vel minores, 
Virgines ac confessores 
Chief of whose peculiar glories 
Est in Aula Regis stare 
Atque orare et exorare 
Et clamare et conclamare 
Clamantes cum clamoribus 
Pro nobis peccatoribus.) 



Let me not conceal it . . . Rode I. 

(For who but critics could complain 
Of" riding " in a railway train ?) 
Across the valleys and the high- land 
With all the world on either hand 



44 8 



THE END AGAIN 

Drinking when I had a mind to, 
Singing when I felt inclined to ; 
Nor ever turned my face to borne 
Till I bad slaked my heart at Rome. 



Lector. But this is dogg- 
Auctor. Not a word ! 



*~T ftv &y & 




FINIS 



